[anigbrowl]

I think there might be a reason two sides aren't talking.

Conservatives: Rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required

Fuck Joe Biden

Fuck your feelings

These are all t-shirt slogans you can buy at conservative political events, and they're quite widespread rather than exceptional.

Also conservatives: Why am I being shadow banned, this is viewpoint discrimination!

To be clear, there are obnoxious people and outright assholes all over the political spectrum. But conservatives have made outrage and offensiveness their brand, in recent years. I remember being astonished and disgusted by the gleeful antagonism of Rush Limbaugh back int eh 1990s when conservative talk radio first became A Thing following the Reagan administration's abolition of the 'Fairness doctrine.'

[rhaksw]

> I think there might be a reason two sides aren't talking.

Both sides can certainly find a reason not to speak to each other. The left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene. It's always been like that, with one having the power to censor the other.

Here's an example [1]. One side, a well known entrepeneur/investor, is arguing for no censorship, and the other side, a well known disinformation researcher [2], argues for limits of the reach of certain content. One has blocked the other, so they no longer communicate directly.

Five years ago, someone at Twitter might have observed this interaction and decided, "I'm going to secretly action content. That will satisfy both the disinfo labeler and the anti-censorship crowd." Yet in doing so, as we can see, nobody is satisfied. They're still not talking to each other, and they don't understand why. The reason is due to the secrecy built into all of these platforms where an unknown third party is actioning content without anyone involved in the conversation knowing about it.

See also Free speech for me--but not for thee : how the American left and right relentlessly censor each other [3] (Nat Hentoff, 1992)

[1] https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1599532506252214272

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f...

[3] https://archive.org/details/freespeechformeb0000hent/page/n9...

[anigbrowl]

Interesting though these points are (and I'm familiar, as I am personally acquainted with DiResta), I think you are looking at this issue in too abstract a manner.

Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you. Don't owe them a conversation or even a hearing.

I don't disagree with your characterization that 'the left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene.' But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats, and it's not a wholly new phenomenon. I put it to you that the people who are amused by and choose to promote messages like 'rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required' do not actually give a shit about free speech but are opportunistically employing the grievance for political leverage.

Get back to me on this when the right stops openly calling to murder people on such a frequent basis and I'll be happy to consider it in more abstract terms. I see why you're concerned about this, but having extensive first hand experience of political violence I think shadow bans are a relatively minor issue by comparison.

[rhaksw]

> Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you.

I never said there was. Even free speech law has limits and may punish such speech.

What I advocate is for authors of secretly removed content to be able to discover the removal, because even if the comment is vitriolic, the offending author may perceive the lack of a response as tacit approval of their words.

> But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats

Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1]. This is wrong, short of something that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", a definition from Nadine Strossen [2].

[1] https://archive.ph/1NeiV

[2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c...

[ModernMech]

> Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1].

It’s the Republican, Trump-appointed, FBI director’s assessment that extremist right-wing political violence (read homegrown right-wing terrorism) is far and away a bigger problem than left-wing violence.

Jan 6 I hoped would have demonstrated that clearly once and for all. After that day, it has become impossible to “both sides” political violence in the US — it really is asymmetrically coming from the right.

[rhaksw]

It's not my intent to pick sides. I highlighted the left there only because parent focused on the right.

Regarding shadow moderation, I can promise you that every side of every issue in every geography and on every major platform uses it. See the talk linked in my profile for examples.

[TheHappyOddish]

It's getting very boring hearing Americans going on about "Jan 6th". Some protesters entered a building. It's not that big a deal, no "political violence" happened.

It's been 20 years and Americans have finally recently stopped harping on about "9/11", after decades of them murdering orders of magnitudes more innocents. It's incredible to see them committing some of worst attrocities in the world and still loudly yell about their own tiny issues.

[ModernMech]

Leader of Oath Keepers was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, so you’re wrong about that.

[anigbrowl]

I'm aware of what you're advocating because you repeat it so often. I have no objection to your points about discoverability (indeed I mentioned else where that sufficiently obnoxious tweets could be highlighted as ban-worthy, rather than simply being removed - although this wouldn't mitigate the harm done by posting slurs etc.

It's a little odd to me that you contemplate hypotheticals like 'perceiving the lack of response as tacit approval.' It's not that this is incorrect, but that you're overlooking evidence of the alternative: when platforms like Twitter or FB leave posts up (to gather both argument and support) but attach some sort of note saying 'this post might be disinformation' or words to that effect.

That is what you are asking for, no? A clear signal that the social media post is disfavored by the platform operator in some way, such that the author is notified and given some context, and so is everyone else. I would appreciate if you would clarify whether or not this meets your desired standard of transparency.

The reason I bring this up is that when this approach is applied, authors of the controversial posts tend to hate it and still scream that they're being censored by being publicly shamed, or having words inserted into their social media post by the platform operator (notwithstanding the extremely obvious distinction.. Twitter has gone farther again by allowing users to add meta-commentary in the form of notes (previously birdwatch), but on controversial topics said notes are often railed against by the original author or the subject of meta-controversy by people trying to spam the note system with negative characterizations of the notes themselves.

If you're going to make transparency of moderation into your political cause (and you very much seem to approach it this way), then I think you should go all the way and address the questions of why people are not happy even when they get what you are advocating for, and just pivot to a slightly different variation of the same argument about how they're being censored and it's a terrible injustice etc.

Incidentally the definition in your 2nd link is not from Nadine Strossen; it's just a restatement of the prevailing legal standard for incitement (from Brandenburg v. Ohio) and indeed seems to be offered as such in the text. Like the 'true threat' doctrine, this definition is being interpreted in increasingly elastic fashion in our era of instantaneous mass communication.

I'm familiar with Strossen's book but also consider it to be written from a comfortable suite in an ivory tower. Like many well-intentioned idealists, she acknowledges the possibility of violence but argues that it must be met by reasoned debate and nonviolent resistance. I reject this posture, because it basically says people who are the target of violence should accept their role as punching bugs (or targets of gunfire) in exchange for the possibility of moving the conscience of elites who review circumstances, form policy, render decisions, and recognize peers (eg accepting or rejecting the validity of other states). In this mode of argument, willingness to passively sacrifice oneself is the threshold of acceptability - becoming famous for your advocacy and then dying for it like Christ, King, or Gandhi is the way to go. And conveniently, once people are dead they can be cited as moral exemplars without the troubling possibility of them reappearing and critiquing subsequent outcomes.

Oddly, I don't see Strossen or her peers throwing themselves in front of violent mobs in an attempt to bring them to moral clarity. Having at various times been arrested, attacked, beaten by a mob, and beaten by cops while engaged in wholly non-violent political activity, I do not give much weight to pure idealism that isn't grounded in cold hard reality.

This brings me back to your first link, which complains about transgender extremism and was ironically published on the first of April this year. Just in the last three weeks, we've seen a mass shooting at an LGBT club leaving 5 dead and a further 18 injured (Colorado Springs); multiple militant groups, openly armed, demonstrating against a drag queen story hour event while police looked the other way (Columbus, Ohio); well-organized attacks on electrical substations that left a whole county without power for days and happened to coincide with a drag show in the county seat (Moore County, North Carolina).

Now, my strategic assessment is that opposition to drag shows is often a convenient excuse for militant organizing and action, and if all LGBT people magically teleported away to Planet Fabulous tomorrow, the militant organizing and action would quickly pivot to some other scapegoat.

But please, don't waste my time with links about 'transgender extremism' and free speech issues unless you are willing to address the fact that those who oppose the acceptance and freedoms of LGBT folk are themselves engaged in the suppression of free speech and indeed life. I have yet to see any of the conservative/libertarian champions of free speech address the abundant right-wing attacks upon it, probably because they're scared of their own side.

And by address, I don't mean dismissing it with a truism like 'violence is illegal of course.' Rather, try providing evidence of how your preferred approach would mitigate actual and ongoing harms, and why havens of largely unrestricted speech (eg parts of 4chan) are not utopias of thoughtful discussion but rather cesspools of bigotry that celebrate and incite violence as a means to drown out discussion. It's hard for me to take you seriously when the issue you complain about at such length involves so little hardship.

[rhaksw]

> It's hard for me to take you seriously when the issue you complain about at such length involves so little hardship.

It seems you feel that secretive online censorship is not a big deal. I don't see the point in trying to convince you. Plenty of other people, such as those I quoted here [1], do care.

If you'd like me to respond further, please narrow it down to a question or two.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519