The alt-right/theDonald overlap with hate movements is a great example of this. What percent of those Charlottesville marchers and their supporters started doing it just for the memes, or just to light up smarmy internet liberals?

In that sense, removing the most radical groups from a giant forum like Reddit off to silos like stormfront can have a net positive effect.

I think it's (b).

In life we are exposed to a lot of bad ideologies, and the only thing that can help us navigate these ideas is our own thick skin and critical thinking tools and habits. The only way you develop these are through exposure and practice.

I see it as a form of inoculation: on Reddit, a casual visitor has a better chance of seeing counterpoints and ridicule.

Now those groups have scattered like roaches into safer spaces that are less likely to tolerate dissenting opinions, and can claim persecution.

It's the large, non-participatory cohort of people who may have never read the comments that are being helped by banning these groups, because these behaviors seem less 'normal' and 'legitimate' if you don't see them, especially if you're not exposed to them as jokes and pithy quotes.

Some of the coontown people will slink off to the KKK blogosphere and private message boards, but my point is that many of those with only mild biases won't, and so will lose the chance to be radicalized.

And if a community deletes or down-votes dissent: well, that happens but it also becomes a matter of public record and can also inform. Case in point: the moderation of /r/politics.

Nothing is served by "saving" Joe User from being exposed to unpleasant speech in an open forum, due to the fear that he might be adversely affected or even damaged by the experience. This is anti-vaxxer logic, on a meme level.

There is not a public record to be examined and ruminated on, on the contrary it's a situation where you can go and see "oh 151,400 subscribers to fatpeoplehate, this is normal behavior", or (more likely) people who never view comments will just start to see jokes about killing the obese on their front page feed.

There's a difference between 'saving people from unpleasant speech' and providing an echo chamber to hate speech along side the company's incredibly popular other content.

I don't see the connection to antivaxxer logic, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there?

Just to be clear I'm not advocating that we ban all 'unpleasant speech' from the internet, but I do think siloing it off so you really have to be looking for it works, and that there's significant evidence to back that up.

In reddit's case in particular, many of the banned subreddits were using smart tactics like brigading and vote manipulation to amplify their numbers, and push the 'this is normal' message even further, although that's somewhat orthogonal to what we're arguing about.

Then in the mid-90s, some new research suggested that making crime more difficult to commit in one place actually prevents crime everywhere; criminals, like most people, are fundamentally lazy, and putting up inconveniences makes them more likely to just not commit any crime at all. In the 20 years or so since, crime rates have fallen by more than half.

Some redditors probably did go off somewhere else where they could spew invective. Most just went back to looking at gifs of dogs falling down stairs or whatever.

Just because you can't achieve an idealized scenario doesn't mean you should not try for some improvement.

I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles. Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not sure it gets more clear than pointing to a bunch of scientists that directly contradict their understanding.

For example there is a large overlap between pro-fossil fuel and nationalist attitudes. It is fairly easy to get some concessions about renewables from them once you point out that renewables mean energy-independence and not giving money to the middle east.

If you have no scruples of adopting their arguments for the sake or arguing you can also make your argument explicitly anti-jewish by pointing out that israel would be a far less important strategically if the US did not depend on oil as much. It seems like people have trouble applying logic of this kind because they fear being seen endorsing the arguments that they use but in the end it's just a form of playing devil's advocate.

If you have a thread where the general tone is that all blacks should be killed then maybe an admission that this would not be a smart move and better solutions can be found is already progress. Small progress, but still important, nudging things in a better direction bit by bit. And yes, board culture does change over time, imperceptibly to most, but it does change.

At what cost in those who see the basic terms of debate validated by engagement? When you're arguing that only some black people should be killed instead of all of them, what harm are you doing by legitimizing the basic question of whether blacks should be killed?

In the past, even in many brutal wars, belligerents generally recognized the need for parley. This is not even a war, it is a disagreement about social norms and laws. If villainize the other side to the extent where it would be immoral to even speak to them you're only fueling the polarization instead of creating a continuum. Look at europe. The extreme right exist too, but between the left and the right there are many different currents represented in parties, which lowers the activation potential for people gradually switch camps.

Wait a sec, can you explain how this is anti-jewish? As a person of Jewish ethnicity who does not support many actions of the Israeli government, I fail to see how this makes the argument anti-Jewish. I do concede that it might make it more appealing to those with anti-semitic sentiments.

That is what I meant to say.

That said, both /pol/ and the israeli government tend¹ to lump anti-zionism and anti-semitism together. In the former case due to the purported¹ global jewish conspiracy, in the latter case because it makes a cheap knockout argument against anyone questioning their treatment of palestine.

So I phrased it through that lens.

¹ do I really have to pepper those qualifier words everywhere?

Yes, because I've personally met such people.

> I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles. Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not sure it gets more clear than pointing to a bunch of scientists that directly contradict their understanding.

Changing minds takes a lot of empathy and skill (and usually time) to pull off consistently in person, much less online; I'm not surprised that a strategy of throwing scientific articles in people's faces (which they will probably never read) would be unsuccessful. Regardless, even if you are successful, you will probably never know unless you have a long term relationship with the individual.

A few years ago he was just a plain ol' gentle soul, and he liked to watch those militant atheist videos on Youtube (I have no opinion about such). I guess one of them had some sort of anti-Islam recommended video that caught his eye, because I remember the day we went out for lunch and he told me about a video he watched about Islam.

I have quite a few Muslim friends so I spent some time gently dissecting what he was saying. None of what I said stuck. Over the following year, he got deep into the rabbit hole, until how awful Muslims are is all he'd talk about.

I had to end the friendship, despite my efforts to talk him out of that, because that garbage had literally become the entirety of what he was into/wanted to chat about. (Objectionable and boring, hah.)

- making a statement to new users and new forums about what is acceptable and what isn't. Some times it's warranted to take some action even if only symbolic.

- making it inconvenient to be an ass. People are lazy and habitual. With luck, their preferred forum for hate disappearing mess they pick up knitting instead of looking for another forum (in the same way that preventing crime in one area doesn't move it but actually reduces overall crime.)

Recently the desire to have your genitalia cut off in order to pass as a member of the opposite sex was considered a form of body dysphoria. Can you point at the scientific breakthrough that changed that? I've been under the assumption it was a social change.

In some cultures, eg areas of India, the concept of a third sex has been well established, those in such communities often find transsexualism to be strange yet accept the idea loosely described by eg "male body female mind".

So, I'd be interested in that pointer, that shows acting out genital removal is not "aberrant". Does the research also show it's not mental illness to want to become deaf, an amputee, etc.?

Direct me to one of your previous discussions if you like.

It was considered so until 2013, when Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders dropped it as a mental illness: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-transgender... Not that I think this has any relevance: many things once considered mental disorders are now considered personal traits. The point is that it's not an outlandish thing to believe, just an outdated one.

Welcome to join me.

I see this argument made a lot, however I'd like to see proof that giving such people arguments can change them.

I personally don't think that's the case. It's like giving a Christian arguments that God doesn't exist.

1. Moved from a vague agnosticism to atheism

2. Maintained a vegetarian diet for 10 years

3. Shifted my politics from the far-left toward the center-right

Who are these people who think minds never change? That's what I see repeated over and over without evidence.

Minds never change in the moment. That's not how beliefs or the stubborn humans who hold them work. But beliefs can -- and do! -- change over time.

1. you have at least average intelligence

2. you can entertain logical arguments, since software development involves a lot of mathematical logic

3. you are heavily exposed to American culture and San Francisco's progressiveness, even those of us that are not even living in the US ;-)

4. you have a good education, either from an Ivy league school, or because you are an efficient autodidact

5. you are middle class and have your basic needs satisfied by your salary

Don't get me wrong, but there's a high probability that you're living in a bubble, just like most of us here and you're really not representative of the average population.

I think that's disastrously wrong on all counts.

A better metaphor would be that if you confine the Christians to their ghettoes soon someone will take up arms against the infidels.

I agree that 'curing' them should be a goal but stopping the spread via quarantine is useful on its own. Forcing them off into their own corner is disrupting their recruitment channels which means there's less to cure tomorrow.

Good intentions are the opposite of good actions. (An old German saying I quite like.)

But what I hear them saying is, "Hey it's cool to hate and harass half of the US population based on appearance!" I am one of the people you reference who thinks that that "cannot be corrected," but that's because it's not a falsifiable hypothesis! Neither is it "the truth," it's just their opinion. And it is something that I think bored, mostly teenage, people may buy into due to "digital peer pressure," which is admittedly a somewhat hair brained new concept, but based on real effects.

Though with rampant censorship these days, few people have to build up any kind of argument to counter these bigots. It's a lot easier to hit a downvote button, or a ban button, than to present a reasoned argument at all.

What a fantastic place the internet is evolving into. A haven for, well, some kind of speech. Not free of course. Restricted and safe speech. Perhaps speech licenses and internet ID's soon? If you say something bigoted we can throw you in jail and fire you. Harass your friends and family too. It's the only way to protect a free and open society.

I think your point is not invalid, this study was simply confined to the community of Reddit.

Let's take the fat people hate subreddit. Okay, you ban every user and the subreddit itself. Some people make new accounts, and a new subreddit about hating fat people, so you ban all those too.

Did that convince anyone that their opinions were wrong? Absolutely not. If anything, convinced them, in their eyes, that they were onto something and had to be silenced.

All it's done is driven people with those bigoted opinions away from Reddit. These people still exist (until we start exterminating them I guess) and will continue to speak their bigotry wherever it is they do end up. All that's really accomplished is just cleaning the website of speech you don't want anyone to see. Kind of like sweeping dust under a rug - still there, can't see it though. Out of sight, out of mind.

Someone else's pest-problem.

In the case of Reddit this argument is especially worth consideration given how common it is for people to promote bigotry with memes & other jokes or selective filtering (remember the guys who only post negative news stories featuring black criminals?). It's very plausible to believe that many users, especially younger ones, hit something like /r/news or /r/funny and end up on a hate subreddit without realizing how far off of the mainstream it is. That seems especially worth studying given the common anecdotal accounts from parents who found their kid managed to start out in a Nintendo forum an end up in pretty dark places.

The real problem with having "offensive" subs removed is that now they are going to target the next layer of speech.

You see this on reddit. Now that they succeeded in banning coontown, fph, etc, they are now targeting political subreddit. Hell during the election, there was a push to have the_donald banned.

Then what? Christian subs? Food subs that advocate meat consumption?

It is encouraging a culture of outrage and censorship. Which is very scary.