> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
For me personally, the echo chamber on both sides is enough to keep me far away from both /r/politics and /r/The_Donald.
For example, you cannot say anything positive about Trump on /r/politics. Nothing. There was a screenshot showing that there were 231 negative articles posted and zero positive articles. It's literally propaganda, but from the other direction.
Now, you can argue that you should fight the good fight and that it's immoral to say anything positive about him. Sure, I sort of buy that: If Trump was equivalent to nazis, then we should resist that from becoming a reality.
And yet he's not. From what I've studied of history, the climate today is similar-ish to 1920's Germany. But if you examine the details of how the Nazi party seized power, you'll find they held guns up to people's heads in order to get various statesmen to vote a certain way. The German political institutions were captured by popular vote, then by force. And as long as we avoid the latter, the former isn't necessarily an indication that fascism is on the rise.
But it's hard to make that argument in this climate. If you try, you're shouted down or misinterpreted or outright framed. And that's the central issue here: When you become a zealot, you lose the ability to take advantage of the opposition's good ideas. Are you sure it's true that Trump's entire political franchise has had zero good ideas?
I'm worried that in the process of fighting Trump, we'll lose reason and rationality.
You're not wrong in that its important to hear both sides, but its also important to hear an appropriate amount from each side corresponding to the acceptableness of the ideas. Minority voices are important. When we find ourselves in the majority, we should be responsible for ensuring that those minority voices have a way to be heard. But not that they should automatically be heard equally to majority voices in all spaces.
Trump is a minority voice. The election results and polling are clear on that. So the question becomes more about how much weight we, as the majority, should give to those ideas. And like, I hate to be that guy, but... not much. He doesn't actually seem to have any substantive policies to debate, its just slogans and ideas. The substantive stuff either gets mentioned and then forgotten by the next news cycle (what happened to the national emergency on opioids?), changes on a whim, or is just him talking and other people in his administration (or party) ignoring him and doing whatever they wanted.
I just don't see the value in spending a lot of time/cognitive load considering that perspective on a regular basis, though I do venture into T_D sometimes to see what they are thinking. The current dichotomy of /r/politics vs /r/the_donald seems to have balanced itself out pretty well, I think.
I think this is actually irrelevant; it doesn't matter whether someone's ideas are in a minority, only whether they are good ideas, bad ideas, and the proponent is interested in constructive engagement.
I always try to make sure I give a politician as much credit for their intent as possible not just those I agree with but everyone.
No one is just a bag of evil or only good. Yet when we discuss politics we always end up there as this thread is a good example of.
Whatever legacy Trump will end up leaving we don't know yet. It might lead to something amazing even if it wasn't on purpose (certainly happened to Reagan) or it might be that just the right kind of irrationality is actually quite rational in hindsight.
Political decisions often have decades of decay. It's impossible to say what Trumps (the few he has actually made) are going to mean.
It's never that simple.
3 top post from /r/politics (right now):
* 17 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. It’s time to revisit those stories * South Carolina women’s hoops team decline invite to White House * Nobody knows where Trump's leftover inauguration funds went, causing outrage and change in Washington
One sided: yes. Something that is problematic for advertisers: probably not.
On r/the_donald:
* Raise your hand if you're the greatest shitposter of all time! GOD-EMPEROR * MRW I wake up to GEOTUS shitpostsGOD-EMPEROR * Stand, Never Kneel! They Deserve Our Respect #fucktheNFL#StandForOurAnthem
Now try to be impartial. Is that advertiser friendly? Is that quality content?
It's something of a myth that T_D needs to be banned in order to appease advertisers. They keep to themselves.
Fortunately spez is smart. Bringing down the hammer on T_D could very well start a civil war. He seems to be wary of this.
If there's enough eyeballs. Probably.
To imply that those two are equal, is disingenuous.
Spiteful trolling usually gets down-voted to hell as well (thankfully).
A little too often I see hyperbolic vitriol and shitposting persist, and though I don't mind the odd gag, it's not warranted. It clogs the thread as much as anything else.
That subreddit is impartial in itself. It's consensus of the participants, not censorship, if unpopular ideas aren't promoted whichever way they lean.
edit: It would actually be kind of interesting to pull those kinds of statistics and display them — for various subreddits.
>though you may be disagreed right to the bottom.
Is there a difference?
Both actions basically say "this speech is not worthy of consideration around here". The difference between making it still available to serve as a warning or removing it entirely is not meaningful IMO.
There is a difference. You are being obtuse.
As is required to maintain what I would call a "democracy" with "individual rights". We have to be vehemently intolerant of intolerance and marginalization (in general), and this is more important than free speech. Free speech is an artefact of-, not a requirement for democracy. Tolerance is required, however. Some people get this backwards, usually the kind of people who can't keep their foot out of their mouth.
That seems like a pretty grand statement to make offhand and pretend like it's objective.
Free speech is in the very first amendment. #1. Yet you feel so comfortable hand-waving it away.
Freedom of Association implies just the opposite of your argument, that intolerence is specifically protected.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Democracy was nearly a foreign concept to them and it very gradually evolved in the US after the Bill of Rights passed.
"The Founding Fathers rejected 'democracy' as defined by the Greeks, preferring instead 'a natural aristocracy', whereby only the landed gentry were entitled to a place in Congress."
Democracy was nearly a foreign concept to them and it very gradually evolved in the US after the Bill of Rights passed.
"The Founding Fathers rejected 'democracy' as defined by the Greeks, preferring instead 'a natural aristocracy', whereby only the landed gentry were entitled to a place in Congress."
Being intolerant isn't always a bad thing either.
Everything is not black or white. Move the pieces around and the minority become the majority in different contexts.
I realize that "intolerance of intolerance" is paradoxical in nature, but common sense and a little charity in interpretation goes a long way.
It just happens that on these little internet message boards, the consensus shifts in another favour, and the same seems to be [mainly] true in North American societies, amongst others.
You won't get consensus out of me for that.
> Racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you hate it, you must be correct.
This isn't about correctness.
The viewpoint is:
Racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you support them, you must be evil and desire harm to others, at very least indirectly.
Even if the racists/misogynists of the world were 'correct' I wouldn't want to live in world where we legitimize that. And that's why a lot of us reject him and his policies wholesale.
Saying "well he's right about free trade" (I don't believe this, but as an example) undermines the rhetorical context of fighting something much worse than bad economic policy.
Also because someone in your view is misguided about race or gender does that mean you should treat them as I am assuming you believe they treat people of other race or gender?
Why is it a better world to live in where you ban one view rather than the other when the result is more less the same. Someone is getting oppressed.
I think these are pretty well defined.
Racism: Prejudice against others based on race.
Misogyny: Prejudice against women.
> It's easy to say that others are and forgetting that most people are to some extent.
There's a difference between having a normal level of in-group selection bias and realizing it is wrong, and spouting racist/sexist rhetoric.
> Also because someone in your view is misguided about race or gender does that mean you should treat them as I am assuming you believe they treat people of other race or gender?
No. You still let them speak and vote but you don't listen, and if asked, you tell other people they shouldn't listen. You can refuse to let them use your company to spread their hate.
You have a right to free speech, you don't have a right to someone else's bully pulpit.
The concern that racists are getting oppressed is laughable. I don't understand the mental gymnastics required to justify that thought process.
Trump is a good example of a person who has said some racist things but even more things that were interpreted as racist.
We are all racist even if we don't want to be, we cannot help ourselves the question then becomes how do we let that affect us and how we act on that.
And so if it only takes one example to show someone is racist then we all are.
It's much less well defined once you look at the entirety and doesn't just take a sentence out of its context.
Language is tricky and defining something well does not mean it's easy to put things into these boxes.
You are right there is a difference and to the extent, it easy to identify this racist/sexist rhetorics we should obviously object to it.
But it's not much different when liberals paint all Trump voters racist. Very often do we see comments that were not meant racist suddenly be attacked simply because of the person who said it.
You are not a better person just because you are against racism if you base your judgment of what constitutes a racist or a racist remark on who said it and we shouldn't listen to you more by your own definition.
You can very easily be a Trump voter and not a racist and you can eve be a Trump voter and against racism or misogyny as that exist on both sides. Yet listening to the public debate one should think it only happens on one side.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yet it seems like most liberals (and I count myself amongst the liberal crowd) basically justify the sentiment you seem to be supporting with something along the lines of "well he/she started".
There are (luckily) very few racist in the Hitler sense of racist.
Not true. There was positive commentary about Trump's speech in South Korea. I think you just misestimate how often the thing he does is perceived by the general public as bad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7bldfo/trump_mad...
on /r/the_donald accepting criticism of Donald Trump.
In what respects? As far as I can recall, the US did not just move from a monarchy to a democratic republic 15 years ago as a result of a revolution after loosing a world war.
I think the populist discontent behind Trump is real and concerning, but Pre-WWII Germany and current day US are very, very, different places. I think its fair to request that if you wish to make a parallel with Nazi Germany, you substantiate the claim with specific historic evidence.
there was dropping the tpp... maybe. that's probably good, but i have mixed feelings. anything else?
I'm contrasting that with (my) Canada who has been actively signing with China since the first rumblings of trade discord with the US.
Not saying it's impossible or not true, but I'm wary. That weird angry screaming he did at his bizarre presser the other day was not overly convincing. If it was anybody else, I would have sworn they were on uppers of some kind...
Some of the stuff he said on the campaign sounded great - in fact enough to get him elected. It appears he has no intention of implementing it. Does that make it worth discussing? No.
As we say about startups, ideas are cheap and execution is everything.
It says more about Trump's fans that they're willing to overlook his egregious failings and attack and undermine quasi-impartial institutions just to point score than it does about bias.
Travel ban targeting Islamic countries
Withdrawal of Paris Agreement
Fired head of FBI when Comey wouldn't declare personal loyalty
Issued a directive to the department of health agencies "waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay" portions of the ACA
Soon to be pretty closely tied to:
Tax bill making graduate school significantly more expensive
FCC votes to kill net neutrality next month
These are, in my opinion, the worst offenses. There are many other things that he is either responsible for or closely related to. A simple google search yields list after list of things he's done both large and small.
Is it worse than Bush administration who started a war?
It's claimed that somehow Trump is the worst of them all. From what you have stated here do you personally think they are worse things than Bush starting a war?
Anyway - yes, I do think that conspiring with hostile foreign entities to manipulate voters and undermine American democracy is worse.
The purpose is to test whether the claim that Trump is somehow worse than everyone else based on the mentioned examples of his bad deeds really holds up to a sanity check.
I think your last sentence much better illustrates who of us are in good faith here though.
The later is interesting the former is boring.
Simple failure to do the job: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics...
Which of his actions shows that he is that bad.
You don't have to be a Trump supporter to see that you are proving the parents' point.
Your hypocritical hivemind tends to overlook that your queen bee accepted tens of millions from the KSA/Qatar in campaign contributions with the knowledge that, in her OWN words, they provide clandestine and logistic support to ISIL. It's OK to be white, it's OK to be American, and it's OK to love your country.
Subreddits are reflective of the moderators and readers. There is no objectively higher criteria to determine whether a subreddit is or should be "free from bias", only that they should reflect the makeup their membership, which they do.
I think it absolutely does.
"unbiased" is, if hearing is given to a position, it is either not represented with favor or disfavor, or any expressions of favor and disfavor are combined in such quantity that there is no obvious position with respect to (un)favor.
"objective" is, if hearing is given to a position, it is discussed in terms of empirical data that persists regardless of subjective views or interpretations.
"balance" coverage is giving hearing to all positions, no matter how idiotic or inane. "balance" is giving nazis and jews equal airtime to argue their views on whether the holocaust is a good idea. "balance" is rapists and rape victims debating the merits of rape.
Especially since in most accounts, Trump is more alike with Obama than not. Obama send home hundreds of thousands of immigrants, both back a shameless war machine (in fact Trump was more reluctant about that and more isolationist until the republican establishment forced his hand -- and then press found him instantly, if temporarily, more "presidential"), both have advanced the interests of corporatists, etc. If you didn't have the Obamacare repeal (which I'd call bad) they'd be 99% alike in their results.
One had better table manners and is a better (still ho-hum and totally fake) actor (in the kind of low quality populist soft-PR video like "the President interviewed by Zach Galifianakis" and "Another day at the office", etc that presidents feels obliged to put out post Clinton who popularized that BS to show us how funny and/or everyday people they are) compared to the vulgar billionaire, but that's more or less it.
There's a fundamental imbalance in how the standard is applied, and it's clearly ideological.
If the people that liberals want thrown from helicopters ( fascists ), are only in that group because they want to throw people from helicopters....
Isn't that the same logic as "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun"? The liberal subs HATE, HATE groups. They aren't calling for random white people, religious people, or fiscally responsible people to be thrown from helicopters.
Both sides of that fight seem to have legitimate cause to claim self-defense.
>They aren't calling for random white people, religious people, or fiscally responsible people to be thrown from helicopters.
No, but they do seem to be a hair away from actively endorsing subjugation. A lot of them seem to have already taken steps to make sure that that demographic can't have a voice in their movement. They also seem to have set the precedent that any criticism of their activism from outside their movement makes you an enemy. I get the feeling that a lot of them would do all those terrible things, if they could. There are fundamental tenets of the movement that give people an excellent excuse to do horrible things.
Instead, we could just, not? I liked the "judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin" thing we had going on. That's an easy rule to enforce, but less so when you start carving out special exceptions that mostly benefit your voter base.
In line with the original top comment, why don't you publicly declare that you you'll treat discrimination/slander of whites/men/conservatives/scientists/free-speech-advocates on this platform just as harshly as you would any other group instead of asking me to send you a dozen emails per day.
FWIW, I hate the left and the right movements in equal strides, the left want me to feel terrible for being born a straight white male in a western post-colonial society, the right want the poor and under-priviliged to suffer and horde things like medical care.
Understanding that there is a grey-scale and that ideologies are not absolute is the only way to proceed in my opinion. Being polarised only turns into fighting because nobodies view gets represented properly instead both sides put up strawmen.
Ironically to me, your second paragraph illustrates why your first paragraph matters: As someone belonging firmly on "the left" your description does not fit me at all, at least not in my view.
The problem, then, when someone wants to go to extremes in treating anyone over their perceived ideology is defining what it means to belong to or support said ideology sufficiently strongly to warrant that extreme action.
And hence I do agree with your last paragraph.
Twitter is rife with absolute venom if you even suggest a term such as "mansplaining" is sexist.
I think it may be time for Reddit to experiment with removing the downvote button, or maybe give it 25% of the power it has now, or something along those lines.
13 out of 25 of the front page of /r/politics right now (sorted by hot) are Trump news. 16 out of 25 if sorting by top.
That doesn't seem excessive, considering how vocal Trump is.
When /r/anarchism (left leaning sub about anarchism, antifa, communism, ...) mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, reddit only removed the mods in question instead of closing the sub.
When /r/physical_removal (right leaning sub about pinochet 'memes') mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, the sub was removed.
When /r/nazi (third position leaning sub about national socialism) - well, I don't actually know whether the mods there refused to enforce reddit's rules. It's been removed.
How does your speculation or the fact that you simply have heard these things make your argument any persuasive? What is the actual ground reality?
/r/anarchism is a slightly more complicated case. They do advocate violence in a "bash the fash" way. But their intended victims are often those who advocate for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other racist or misogynistic methods. Their violent earnestness is also often mocked by the rest of political Reddit.
/r/LeftWithoutEdge was a sub formed for serious discussion for lefties without resorting to violent speech. It doesn't get enough traffic so I urge any leftists / anarchists here to visit it occasionally.
Edit: I should add that one reason /r/anarchism and /r/socialism are still on Reddit is because they took the warnings of the admins seriously. /r/anarchism dialed their rhetoric back after being told they were on the verge of being banned. Most of the banned right wing subs ignored the warnings, and often doubled-down.
/r/strikeaction
/r/militant
are some of the more obvious choices.
Of modern left is too sensitive and too unable to accept that other have different opinions. Point of view depends on point of sitting...
I'm not going to blame those nasty subreddits on the left; I'm going to blame those & all other nasty subreddits on the general nastiness of people, no matter what their philosophy or politics.
"Anti-conservative hatred" as equivalent is ridiculous on its face and whatever "misandry" the SRS guys promote should probably be understood in a context where there is no country on Earth where men are oppressed in comparison to women.
I'm not even saying any of those subs are good, but nobody in their right mind is going to equate them with people advocating genocide or "incels" advocating rape.
Libertarians can be left-wing, so the premise seems irrelevant to the conclusion.
Had I been familiar with /r/atheism, I might have been able to guess which of those was correct.
But thanks for your “help”.
Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
It's pretty easy for a tech platform to be politically neutral. All you need are objective rules for how content "get to the top" and equal opportunity for whatever system is in place to be abused.
That last one is the problem though. Regardless of which side is doing it, there's a sense of unfairness felt by the other side when they see the system get gamed. And it invariably will. Hence the knee jerk reaction to rebalance things, which leads to calls of bias from the other side, and the cycle continues.
> Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
> > Every subreddit listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... could be argued to be political and protected under "political neutrality".
> Do you seriously consider unconsenting upskirt photos of women[1] political speech? Not just, free speech, but specifically "political speech"?
No, and I'd kindly ask you not to attribute such a position to me.
But I'm willing to bet someone does think it's political speech. See also NAMBLA, etc. And consider that gay rights boosters would have been put in the same basket a while ago.
this happens when you're unclear with words or leave a lot of wiggle room. saying "[it] could be argued" and then suggesting you're unhappy with being associated with that position is a bit of a time waster.
We can’t effectively reason about social media censorship by analogizing it to meatspace.
Just as virality mechanisms amplify “good” content, they also change the equilibrium state of whose ideas can spread.
Censorship programs work like a squirt of insecticide into a beehive, they kill off some functional parts of the hive organism and eventually lead to the destruction of all of the bees inside.
Similarly, censoring “fake news” or “abusive content” poisons the environment for ideas in a similar way. Ideas are not evaluated objectively. We each react to them emotionally and experience them via the social meaning we associate with them. Prejudices are not rational and are countered by ample evidence, yet there is much prejudice and much religious faith... such beliefs carry a meaning payload enjoyed by their host.
The fear suffered by social media firms (like reddit) is that someone will screenshot a piece of offensive speech alongside an ad paid for by an advertiser, and the advertiser will worry that his/her brand is being associated with that speech.
This is why Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have a job.
Social media firms are thus following in the path of other media firms and are (like The NY Times) putting ad revenue ahead of the first amendment. This isn’t unexpected, these firms are the “tories” of our day.
Second, society has always been self censoring, but the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals. And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored, and as a result has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit. I think that reddit is worried about advertising, yes, but I also think they are concerned about a decline in engaged usership.
It's also been 'incorporated' against the states (and their sub-governments like municipalities).
But free speech, as a political value, isn't restricted to the U.S. Congress. That may be why you keep repeating something that's mostly irrelevant.
Wanting to "escape into pockets of like minded individuals" is pretty much what Reddit is. I can sympathize with the idea that Reddit, or similar sites, should host anything, as long as it's restricted to 'pockets' that accept it.
A lot of the worst behavior is basically people from one pocket invading other pockets and posting unacceptable content. I think it'd be great if Reddit provided (more) effective tools for the mods to police that.
I agree with you about reddit.
My bad – I didn't even notice the comment to which you were replying had done this!
We might be disappointed tho in so far as "first amendment" comes to mean 'free speech' to too many people. I mourn the loss of precision, and I'm a little afraid of people conflating the two ideas too.
He was talking about censorship done by powerful organizations. Literally nothing to do with the constitution of the USA.
Obviously. I'm referring to the general values that led to the US having protections on free speech.
> society has always been self censoring
You are seemingly idealizing the process by which social shaming encourages conformity.
> the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals.
So you either have an idealistic view of an ideologically homogeneous society, or you think that the internet making economies of scale possible for non-mainstream beliefs is broadly a bad thing, regardless of what those beliefs are.
> And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored
I have, and in most cases (other than explicit griefing or bullying) I think this is quite harmful to HN. The content discussed on HN is simply not interesting to most people, which is why HN has survived. It's easy to suffer from hindsight bias and determine that since HN has aggressive moderation HN is better that it would otherwise be.
Someone recently did a study of title edits and found that articles typically drop precipitously after the editors meddle with the title. This is typically because the author's title fails to communicate why the article is interesting to HN readers, while the user-submitted title often does (when they differ).
Worse, the study showed that mods actively bury specific discussions from the site. We really don't know what we're missing due to this, but chances are it's political. This very discussion (critical of social media companies) is of high risk for being censored simply because the main reason for HN article burying is that the article triggers comments that are viewed as overly political in nature.
This view (that political discussion is harmful) is dangerous and naive (and dangerously naive) because it assumes that HN readers are incapable of acting both as techies and as citizens simultaneously, and that with political beliefs nobody will ever change his/her mind based on the merits of someone else's argument. I enjoy HN discussions precisely because I learn a lot. What I learn is not linked to the topic, or to the political nature (or lack of it) of the discussion.
> has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit.
I think the biggest cespool in reddit is /r/gifs and similar fluff that is used by spam marketers to get their content viral. Yes there are things about donald and other obscure and idiotic groups that I've found at random now and then when clicking on the random subreddit button, those are easily ignored.
In fact, the only reason a normal reddit user encounters the morons is because /r/gifs (or similar) are among the default subreddits subscribed to automatically for new accounts, casting a wide net but drastically lowering the bar of discussion.
Gifs are not posted to HN because the community has no interest in that rubbish or any of the similar rubbish it attracts. Reddit would not have a problem if it were not so focused on creating a mass market for ad sales rather than just letting people associate with people they wish to associate with and easily block the bad apples or griefers.
I am idealizing a process in which social shaming encourages conformity. That is the only reason society works, we learn how to interact with other people through this process.
Yes, I think the the internet allows people to isolate themselves from ideas that differ from their own, and that this is a bad thing.
You might be right about HN moderation. I don't know, but I think the mods do a good job. I also don't think the mods have any problem with discussion of political ideals.
I sort of agree with your comments about reddit.
I'll be more careful to avoid confusion in the future :)
> I am idealizing a process in which social shaming encourages conformity. That is the only reason society works, we learn how to interact with other people through this process.
Not sure I agree with this. In one sense, the concept of a social contract requires some degree of conformity of opinion, but I think it gets complicated as we expand outward from the basic social contract.
Democracy by its nature involves conflict of opinion. It's an orderly way of letting the 51% control the 49%. In our society we sort of pretend that laws that have 51% support are "agreed upon" by society, but that's not true in the sense of ideological agreement, it's only true in the sense of resolving conflict over what the law should be.
The mechanisms we consider in a democracy have trade-offs. We could require a two thirds majority or a nine tenths majority before passing a law. The stronger majority we require the more we can feel that our democratic process has reflected conformity of opinion, but also we'll have many more areas where no agreement was reached and the conflict is not formally resolved.
Because of the democratic process, laws generally reflect the broader moral values of the culture, but again many laws do not offer a choice between believing value A and believing value not A, they merely rank one value slightly higher than another. Members of a democracy supporting a law may think value A is more important than value B, while those opposing it may consider value B more important. Both groups may profess strong belief in both values.
I'd argue that shaming is a legacy process that is still hanging around from the days when a lot less had been abstracted and institutionalized. In those days, if you saw a neighbor beating his child, you'd perhaps frown aggressively at the neighbor and say "shame on you". These days you can just call child protective services.
Things like smoking in public are frowned upon by many, and considered rude (and are thus shamed), but this is only necessary in places where the law has not yet come to reflect that value. In many states smoking in public places is prohibited except in designated smoking areas.
But this is a bit of a digression. Just as majoritarianism is occasionally dangerous in democracy, so is the soft majoritarianism of social shaming. This is because shaming itself is used as an in-group signal, and its use (and power) generally follows from existing social hierarchy. Consider that most politicians would never be seen entering certain night clubs or strip clubs, yet we learn every day about one more of these monsters making incredibly creepy unwanted advances toward helpless women. Yesterday alone there were revelations about Al Franken and George HW Bush.
So those most likely to use shaming, and to model what behaviors deserve to be shamed happen to be the ones who benefit most from the social control it offers. The same applies to members of the clergy (who occupy a shadow political system that used to be the main one before the separation of church and state).
Thus basic social conformity (the stuff people like to shame others about) is not an essential quality of civilization, it is a side-effect of authoritarianism and a mechanism of social control.
It is for this reason that the public must suddenly be protected from "fake news". While the examples used for selling the idea are always fairly clear cut, in actuality the algorithmic changes or human censorship applied to prevent the spread of fake news will surely include anything that endangers the status quo.
The reluctance of advertisers to find themselves associated with a non-mainstream belief reflects the preference of the wealthy firm not to endanger its revenue stream. Similarly, any established group or organization has the same basic desire for self-preservation.
So while some shaming has pragmatic goals... booger shaming children prevents the spread of disease, etc., social conformity is a very blunt instrument that is increasingly incompatible with the modern notion of a pluralistic society. The internet has made a new level of pluralism possible, and it threatens those who hold all kinds of power.
We are being told that we must be protected from fake news, protected from hate speech (even from free speech in some cases), protected from various groups, but in reality what is going on is that powerful interests are teaming up to help themselves cling to power and prevent the massive efficiencies in publishing information from ushering in an increased level of pluralism and the corresponding reduction in their own authoritarian power.
Countries with a weaker hold on authoritarian power (like China) have had to take steps to ban speech and cryptocurrencies already. The mistake we make (due to our penchant for American exceptionalism) is to think that we are not following close behind with the same sort of authoritarianism-preserving convulsion.
But if I want to really see what these people are writing, I am free to browse any sub, sort by controversial, and expand the collapsed threads. Win - Win.
Hacker News, OTOH, just seems to 'disappear' wrong-think.
There's a big difference.
Marshawn Lynch has never stood for the national anthem. Not once; even before Kaepernick. He still has a job because he is a great player.
Kaepernick is a whiner.
That is a dangerous road. Today they might be taking down otherwise legal content with which advertisers do not want to be associated. Tomorrow they are being asked to remove content with which advertisers disagree. Suddenly my 1000-word rant on the evils of Microsoft's latest OS is being taken down. Rather than being a free space for discussion, reddit will have become just another moderated online forum where nothing of note ever happens.
Reddit's power comes from negative posts. Facebook and twitter makes headlines when people 'like' things a billion times. They lack the capacity for users to express anger objectively. Reddit makes headlines when it empowers 50,000 gamers to dump on EA. Advertisers like EA should be be paying for such feedback. They evidently already listen to it.
Reddit has already shown that they had the capability and the will to edit users posts, not just removing them. Reddit and other social sites already uses all sorts of algorithms to move content they want to the top and to bury content they don't want. Companies don't want negative PR about themselves or their products. Companies advertising on Reddit are Reddit's actual customers.
You put those facts together and being afraid of Reddit eventually censoring posts critical of customers doesn't seem like fallacious thinking.
You don't throw a chicken into a cage with a starving tiger and call it a slippery slope to say that the chicken is going to get eaten
This is a lie. Hate speech is not illegal, and the SCOTUS has explicitly made this clear.
To not have an understanding of the critical importance for private individuals to speak freely shows an extraordinary lack of knowledge of history, for one. And you declare you are an attorney in your HN "about" page?
They're the same concept. And that concept is also in physics. "Things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force".
As an aside, there is something called the "fallacy fallacy" wherein pointing out a fallacy in someone else's argument doesn't necessarily mean that the argument's conclusion is false.
With that said, I'm not making an assessment of the above poster's reasoning.
It already is. Even if you removed the mods, the hive-mind would moderate unpopular ideas to oblivion anyway.
However, a lot of the top posts are ultimately factual claims. Sweden has a rise in grenade attacks and sexual assaults, British police looked the other way when Muslim Men formed a pedophilia group, most terrorism is motivated by Islam, and there are Islamists whose purported goal is to destroy western civilization. Is it Islamaphobic to highlight these things?
Islamists are right wing themselves (or at least their views map better to right wing views than left wing views) so we need a better lens than "left vs right" to determine the boundaries of the conflict.
Snopes says the increase in reported sexual assaults in Sweden could possibly be to do with the definition of "sexual assault" changing in 2013[0]
Regarding the Paedophile ring, I haven't read any material on it - but there have been several high profile non-Muslim paedophilia cases in Britain, and it would be unsurprising to me if police didn't turn a blind eye at some point. There are some claims that police didn't properly investigate reports in the Jimmy Saville case [1]
Regarding the claim that "most terrorism is motivated by Islam" - are you referring to terrorism globally, or in western countries? And what time period are we talking about here? One interesting data point is that Britain is experiencing historically low rates of terrorism (and most of it was related to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, not Islam) [2]
So the facts above are correct, but the root cause is misattributed to Islam?
[0] https://www.snopes.com/crime-sweden-rape-capital-europe/ [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21756150
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/many-people-killed-terrori...
> The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class and gender—contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations; the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority; lack of a child-centred focus; a desire to protect the town's reputation; and lack of training and resources.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/crime-wav...
Be careful about who you try to defend here, just read any top comment. And dont confuse facts with what's really relevant. For instance, a few days ago I saw a discussion about this:
> a police officer is eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be by a police officer
This is true, and tries to paint a picture of black males being violent (should've seen the comments). But it's two incomparable metrics! Actually, a police officer is ~165 times likelier to be killed by a white male given the same rules.
So yeah, "facts", but always distorted in these subreddits.
Using statistics in bad faith is way too effective.
I agree that pointing things out can be bigoted, but to the extent that politics addresses questions between friend and foe, it's natural that political expression is bigoted. Feminism is inherently bigoted to the extent that pointing out male dominance is important to the feminist perspective, but I don't think that feminists should be censored just because their discussions might offend people.
You're gonna have to prove that's the case. In just about every study, it's been shown that, no, the crime rates are not disproportionately higher.
"Feminism is inherently bigoted"
No, it's not. Not in the slightest. Wanting equality only looks bigoted to those who benefit from the inequality.
Are we even talking about the same thing? There are absolutely groups that commit more crimes than others. Do you honestly need a citation for a claim like, "young men commit more crimes than elderly women?"
>No, it's not. Not in the slightest. Wanting equality only looks bigoted to those who benefit from the inequality.
Feminism isn't bigoted for wanting equality, Feminism is bigoted (but probably correctly so) for highlighting men as the reason there isn't equality. It gets back to my central claim that claims can be bigoted and true/valid/accurate.
You should be able to cite something for that claim, yes. But you know we're not talking about those kinds of groups; we are talking about the ones that are highlighted on sites like Breitbart.
"Feminism is bigoted (but probably correctly so) for highlighting men as the reason there isn't equality."
Feminism doesn't highlight men. Feminism highlights power structures, many of which are put in place by certain men.
Reddit is an ad-supported system. The moment you take advertising, you are now required to maintain editorial control. And that's fine. Advertisers have strict content guidelines, things like: no blood, no violence, no gore, no porn, etc..
Do you think a company like Calvin Klein is going to want to put their fashion ad next to an image of a dead kid? Yah that's not happening.
Instead of setting the expectation on corporations, we need the public to understand what their support of ad-driven media properties mean. And that it's fine.
Reddit isn't a public service. It's not a charity. It's an ad-driven media property, like a TV show or magazine. That's it.
And if conservatives can't accept advertising-based media, they need to find some other outlet to express their views.
Let me put it another way: Do you really think Calvin Klein is going to want to put ads next to images of dead kids? Is that your expectation? If not, how do you expect Reddit to become a profitable company?
Of course, Reddit & Twitter isn't going to state that they're an ad-driven media property, since they want to "appear" unbiased and neutral, but that's completely false. They are absolutely responsible to their advertisers as their core business plan.
Its like Usenet. Lots of unrelated and related NG's. Some are very palatable and high content. /r/electronics, /r/arduino , /r/news ; those sorts of things.
I think there'd be room for lists of "advertising acceptability" while still maintaining the previous freedom of speech ideals they claimed.
Something like:
"Acceptable for all ages"
"Acceptable for most viewers"
"NSFW content, porn related"
"Abhorrent, no adverts unless explicitly request subreddit"
And then the abhorrent ones (say, /r/watchpeopledie /r/blackpeopletwitter), turn into a users-pay system to keep the subreddit alive. Track the sub and make the users pay their share of advertising.
That way, All groups can stay on reddit. They get their traffic they so desire, and the absolutely horrible groups still can stay, albeit segregated and self-monetized.
You can always find a few dollars from crap local family brands and porn companies, but if you want the big bucks, you need the major brands.
Economics sets the rules. How much of your income goes towards porn? How much of it goes towards food or transportation or housing?
The sizes of each of those is directly proportional to the size of their corresponding advertising industries.
How does Honda avoid placing ads next to a pro-Roy Moore articles that might associate their brand with pedophilia?
Another way to filter pages is to follow it in time, for a longer period and if it has multiple positives, then ban it entirely.
As for content that breaks the law, there isn't much of that in the U.S., for obvious reasons. Elsewhere it's another story.
As to politics, I don't think you can expect any of these sites to be politically neutral. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit -- all show their bias. It's OK, it's part of life in a free market. There is a concern that many voices can be shut out of the market, and so maybe there will, at some point, be a decent rationale for temporary (say, ten years) regulations on digital town squares.
There is no such thing as politically neutral when there is money involved. And Reddit owes VC a lot of money.
There was an interesting segment on NPR sometime after Trump won the Republican nomination, looking back on how they had covered Trump during the primaries.
When they got a sense that they had been running more negative things about Trump than they had about the other Republican candidates, or less positive things about him than about the others, they started skipping negative things Trump did or said that would have been top stories if, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich had said or done them, to bring the total number of negative Trump things they ran more in line with the negative things about the others. Same with positive Trump things...they adjusted to keep those at least in the ballpark as those of other candidates.
In retrospect, they realized that they were simply unprepared for a situation where a candidate would have as many negatives compared to others of the same party as Trump had. If they had set some impartial, objective threshold and covered everything from every candidate that crossed that threshold their news segments would have been something like 90% about Trump.
They had implicitly assumed that no candidate would ever be that far out on his party's bell curve, and so killed legitimate, newsworthy stories to try to make the results match that expectation.
When facts become politicized there's no hope of neutrality if you want to remove lies.
First they are prepping for an IPO and need to clean up image.
Second, is being impartial even possible, short of some super-duper AI that after being programmed by biased programmers cleans itself of the bias?
Unless I missed something, there's nothing inherent in /r/politics that requires it to be a dispassionate collection of links that represent all sides of the political spectrum. Don't get me wrong, it's a pit of human misery that I've long since removed from my subreddit list, but it's what users want it to be.
This is coming from a 2x Obama voter and lifelong liberal btw.
fwiw, it is extremely easy to label oneself thus and not be "left leaning" in any meaningful respect.
Where I differ, I suppose, is against the left's general trend towards censorship, anti-free speech attitudes, anti-police attitudes, and this moral preening about immigration (I believe in borders and the importance of cultural assimilation if you are an immigrant, like I am).
It's a horrific source on information on politics, which makes it sad that it is so popular. Unfortunately there are lots of subreddits like that. I can't read a thread in r/conspiracy without feeling bad about the human race. It's a fun (?) game to guess how people can spin any given event. Great rubbernecking material though.
I know it would be incredibly hard to moderate, at least at first. I'm just not sure there is really a desire for such a place since most subreddits seem to be safe-space/echo chambers.
Impartiality can impart political bias if the facts happen to lean one way or the other, as they will from time to time.
What people tend to forget is that all totalitarian systems that came to power, have their origins form reactive movements acting to ineffectiveness or oppressiveness of existing systems. NSDAP was formed in response to worsening national situation. Reds and Whites were formed in response to worsening national situation. Italian fascism was response to political turmoil in post-war Italy. Quite a few European countries romanced with authoritarian rule (or went borderline fascist) in inter-war period.
Let me turn this question around: what if anti-nazi party came into power, and then to assure that no nazi party would ever come into power, it would implement its own authoritarian system? After all a lot of those governments enjoyed popular support during their rise to power, with people willing to give up their freedoms for sake of perceived security.
Back in McCarthyism it was better "dead than red". What if "its good to throw the nazi off the copter" is just a sign of our societies marching to new era of scare?
I would hope that describes virtually every post war western government.
And many of them have implemented various levels of 'authoritarian' systems to prevent the (re)rise of Nazis. Ranging from the banning of books in Germany to more mundane things like the British police spending a lot of time and money infiltrating neo-nazi groups and banning them. In the latter case exactly the kind of thing you are worried about happened - the powers granted to the police were also used to target other non-nazi groups like environmental protestors. Despite being very critical of police tactics in the latter cases, I still have no problem with the police targeting Nazis.
Anyway, western governments don't need to raise the spectre of Nazis to gain support for increased police and surveillance powers. They have plenty of more recent things to talk about (from Irish terrorists to ETA to Islamic terrorists). This comment thread is evidence enough for that - there wouldn't have been nearly the same emotional reaction to somebody talking about bombing ISIS.
So what you are saying is, that all the police have to do is label someone a Nazi, and you'll give them a free pass for whatever it is that they do?
I do think the police should act to try and prevent violent groups from committing violence. Your position seems to be that the state should accept violence as long as the people committing it claim to be political? If anything organised political violence is the type of violence that it's the most important to prevent because it has by far the largest potential for harm.
I can talk about specific things the UK police have done when targeting 'extremist' groups and how I disprove of them if you want (undercover police assuming fake identities to the extent of having children with women in the targeted groups being one). But disapproving of specific things isn't the same as saying the police shouldn't be investigating and infiltrating organisations advocating violent ideologies.
It is dangerous to believe "oh, I don't care what an oppressive government does in order to stop Nazis" because a whole lot of people are being called Nazis these days.
The same exact thing happened during the red scare. It was not JUST the revolutionary communists who were literally trying to overthrow the government that got oppressed. A whole lot of other people who definitely didn't deserve it, got oppressed to.
Human rights exist for everyone for a reason.
Example:
A lot of folks are flabbergasted at /r/The_Donald, but I've always contended that that subreddit exists and developed into its current culture precisely because right-leaning opinions are treated so harshly on most of the rest of reddit. In other words, there was a feeling of suppression and censorship, which leads to the sort of high-energy, irreverent "shit-posting" that is the mainstay of /r/The_Donald.
Open platforms for discussion are actually one of the
best ways to prevent something like the Nazi party from
coming into power.
I agree that public discussion is a powerful tool for changing people's political opinions - but if I think I'm reading a discussion between your peers when I'm actually reading a discussion between two Kremlin trolls, it puts the powerful tool in the hands of people who don't have my best interests in mind.
It's a tough problem to solve - most of the 'obvious' solutions like real name policies I think come with a lot of downsides.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kvvz3/russian-fa...
I think the biggest problem is that it only works when the other side is willing to play by the rules of the game. If the opposition is willing to blatantly lie even in the face of direct evidence then the normal rules of debate just break down. (I know all politicians lie, but Trump's disregard for political norms is completely different from what you got from candidates like McCain, Obama, Romney or Bush).
Similarly from a UK perspective giving disproportionate coverage to UKIP and Farage just increased their popularity.
Isn't this just an example of the same phenomenon I was describing? Sure, they gave him airtime, but it was virtually never positive. There was a tremendous lack of impartiality in the media's coverage of the two candidates. This led to the idea of "fake news" and ended up boosting his supporters even more, giving them reason to band together.
I dare say the outcome of the election could have been different if the media had spent less time trying to demonize Trump and simply reported equally on the two candidates with minimal editorializing.
What's so hard about trusting viewers and readers to come to their own conclusions based on honest, simple, accurate, and exhaustive reporting of events and facts?
It's not. They're reporting on what Trump did. If that's mostly negative, then the coverage is, by necessity, going to be mostly negative. You wouldn't be upset that most of the coverage now of Harvey Weinstein or Louis C.K. is negative, would you?
"If Trump did many negative things and few positive things, then all news publications need to do is simply report on what he's doing and leave it at that."
That's what they did.
"There shouldn't be a need for major news organizations to officially endorse this or that candidate."
That's been a tradition for editorial boards for a long time. Note: That's the editorial, or opinion board. Not the newsroom.
"What's so hard about trusting viewers and readers to come to their own conclusions based on honest, simple, accurate, and exhaustive reporting of events and facts?"
Well, for one, everyone knew the same things about Trump, and yet he was elected. But you're really going to have to prove that what you're asking for didn't happen.
Most of the atrocities around the world are justified because of a feeling of victimization.
I think both sides of the political spectrum feel victimized by each other, and that scares me.
When GP asks for impartiality, think GP would settle for reasonableness, which i think both sides have lost track of years ago.
All i say, is think inwardly, question your beliefs, and most importantly don't question other peoples motives.
The left wins elections when it is the victim of violence, it loses when it tries to use violence itself.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/milo-yianno...
When?
"He has also recently married his fiance, who is a person of colour."
And? Because a man marries a woman, they can't be misogynist?
You're right. However when there are copyright violations on Reddit, they claim it's a platform and they're not responsible for the content on it - ultimately the users are responsible. And then the courts agree and decide that ultimately the violation rests with the user and not with the platform.
However, as they increase the moderation of their platform, they move closer and closer to being responsible for the content. At some point of restriction, they're completely responsible for the content on their platform.
They're welcome to operate the site however they want, but they shouldn't reap the advantages of a public platform while advancing their private interests.
seems to me that there is no "completely" unless they literally screen and evaluate every single post before accepting them. until that point's it's all matters of degree.