We’re going to end up with defacto censorship because most if not all platforms will be threatened into it.
Fundamentally it seems online discussion for human beings has serious bugs. Self policing used to work in the early internet but it seems the volume has overwhelmed most self policing systems.
That however does not change my statement, If we regulate away Anonymous speech we regulate away Free Speech
There is no getting around that fact, so we are going to destroy free speech while claiming we are "protecting it"
Even today, a flood of racist caricatures of Andrew Yang are Flooding from 4chan onto YouTube, instagram, and twitter from maga trolls.
The reason why censorship is coming is because the trolls have ruined a good thing. We can tolerate nazi marches and extremists as long as it is off in a small discredited corner.
But when the fascists start running bots and troll armies flooding forums, making it hard to trust anything, speech has already been censored by sheer lowering of signal to noise.
If I can drown you out with online armies, I don’t need the platforms to censor you, I just need to overwhelm you and make people feel reading the comments is useless and I will have achieved my mission.
The left might be destroying speech in academia, but on the open internet it is decidedly the alt-right and radicals that are endangering free speech.
I (like the US Supreme Court) consider all speech that
1. is not a directly call to immediate violence to a specific date, time, place, and individual(s)
2. Is not defamation
"Racist Memes" is free speech and should be protected
"incitement to violence" would have to include a True Threat, which is a specific legal standard
>>Even today, a flood of racist caricatures of Andrew Yang are Flooding from 4chan onto YouTube, instagram, and twitter from maga trolls.
Of the 3 platforms you list, I only use YouTube, and I rarely look at the comments there.
I do not believe the solution to your perceived problems with memes on these platforms is for mass censorship. The platforms should provide tools for people to block, hide and ignore content they do not personally want to see but not resort to wide scale censorship.
Even if successful in this censorship what do you believe the victory will be? Will have eliminated any racist from the world, will have changed their minds, will have ended extremist? Do you think people that resort to violence are curbed because you can longer see their posts on twitter?
We know this is not the case, infact it often makes the extremism worse when it pushed underground.
>>on the open internet it is decidedly the alt-right and radicals that are endangering free speech.
That depends on your definition of alt-right, which is heavily over used and at this point has no meaning. When Left Libertarians like myself are being labeled "alt-right" because we support free speech (real free speech) the term has lost all meaning.
Authoritarian lefts believe that anyone that do not believe lock step in with their Authoritarian and Identitarian policies are some combination of racist, troll, alt-right or nazi. It is lazy and intellectually dishonest
The cost of speech and publishing has gone to zero in many ways, and with automation, trolls are going to conduct one big denial of service attack. When the founding fathers envisioned freedom of speech and press, they envisioned individuals with soap boxes speaking to crowds, they envisioned some people printing newspapers or pamphlets, they didn't imagine every single person with a megaphone able to blare at a loud volume, and even clone themselves via automation to go blast their megaphone in every hall and park.
When there are no costs, bad actors can spam. The end result in email was the institution of very aggressive spam filters, which made it partially useful again. Public online discourse is becoming so toxic and troll ridden, that either commenting is going to be disabled, or it's going to be aggressive filtered and curated (i.e. censored)
As soon as that happens, the right wing is going to claim their viewpoints are being censored by left wing tech companies. The left wing is going to claim their viewpoints are being censored by an oligarchy in bed with the US empire, and everyone's going to whine about their particular video or missive being taken down by algorithms, because quite simpler, there's no perfect algorithm for this, and the problem is beyond human curation -- even assuming humans themselves could be unbiased curators.
So increased censorship seems inevitable, no one is going to be happy, and mostly because social manners that used to keep people in check in the physical world, have essentially amplified the ability of people to wreak havok and bear no responsibility.
Free speech was never freedom from responsibility. Someone deciding not to work with you of your public statements or behaviors or criticize you was always the check and balance.
The thing with authoritarian leftists on campus, and the alt-right, is that the people getting hyperbolic over pronouns are a minority and not an actual threat. They're also pretty public about it, and don't need to hide who they are. They're not shooting up mosques or synagogues or churches or blowing up Oklahoma federal buildings. In the 70s, the left wing actually would commit terrorism, trying to sabotage property and the establishment, but that has mostly abated.
What we're seeing over the last few years, is a rise in nationalism and ethocentrism, a 'great unraveling',and I worry about that a lot more than I worry about someone on campus demanding their trigger warning safe space.
We have nationalists now at the levers of power, one in fact, the most powerful man in the world. When we have a President who is going to punish people for using the wrong pronoun, I'll start worrying about that.
That is largely your left bias showing, where you completely discount the positions of everyone not on the left when it comes to things like Border Security, and Economic Trade imbalances, left positions that have largly be the cause of the right extremist rising in base few years because the left dismisses them and calls anyone that has a non-left position on the topic "racist" leaving people that do support limited immigration or limited economic protectionism to become more radicalized
Also the fact you call Trump a "nationalist" feeds into my belief you are a far left authoritarian, Trump is alot of things, but for the most part is a Traditional Republican, his policy positions are not that much different than the historic positions of the Republican Party, Actually he is fairly moderate sharing many of the same positions of the Bill Clinton Era Democrats (including immigration policy.
The Simply fact is the Democrat party has moved VERY VERY left... The Republicans have no shifted that much.
You completely ignore and excuse the violence of AntiFa and then go back to the 90's to pull up extreme Right Violence. These are attempts to construct a Strawman to support your narrative that the Right is more violent and a bigger threat than the left therefore the upcoming censorship of the right is some how justified
Nixon proposed national healthcare and created the EPA. Ronald Reagan raised taxes multiple times, gave amnesty to illegal immigrants, and signed the Montreal Protocol to salvage the Ozone layer, he even came to support Gun Control. George Bush Sr signed the ADA, strengthened the EPA, Clean Air Act, signed the Global Climate Change Research Act, etc. George W Bush created Medicare Part D. These Republicans would be considered RINOs in todays party.
Trump isn't a Republican. He supported national healthcare. He came out for gun control. He was anti-Abortion. He supported a wealth tax. One could say, if anything, he was an opportunist, and has no discernable consistent ideological core other than nationalism and racism. He lacks neither the economic conservative libertarian values, nor the social conservative religious values.
You can see this by going back to his politicking in the 80s, where he was constantly harping on the Japanese back then, and where he was involving himself in cases like the Central Park 5.
If you want to gauge if the Democrats are "far left" you need to survey the American people, and when you do so, on issues like Gun Control, Health Care, Education, Benefits, you find they line up with the majority of Americans. By large margins, ranging from 60-80%, the public supports common democratic positions. So if they're far far left, of whom?
No one supports infinite immigration, other than some old school extremist libertarians, that's a strawman used to attack Democrats. Most people acknowledge there is some limit or capacity to absorb people, since there's a limit to how fast housing, schools, and other infrastructure is even built.
But illegal immigration has been declining for decades, and was at a record low in 2016 compared to its heyday in the 80s, 90s. It was a "problem" that was on its way to self-correction. The fact that it has been made a front and center issue for the last 2 years is entirely a racist xenophobic phenomena, no different than the people who were scaremongered over Sharia law in the US.
Given it was a declining problem, not a crisis, one has to suspect other factors driving the interest. This is not a 'left' position, it's a logical one -- why are so many people so upset over something that had already declined by 3x and during supposedly a red hot economy with low unemployment? Why are the Trump supporters still angry at the immigrants in a supposed "time of plenty"?
I really really don't want to get into a debate about this, but it is patently obvious that reactionary politics are using the immigration issue as a way to distract from all of the other problems we are facing: widening income inequality, a healthcare affordability crisis, an education affordability crisis, environmental crisis, etc because to address those issues would require the government actually taxing and regulating the winners in the economy, and their stooges in Congress needed to come up with a way to divert people's attention.
>If you want to gauge if the Democrats are "far left" you need to survey the American people, and when you do so, on issues like Gun Control, Health Care, Education, Benefits, you find they line up with the majority of Americans. By large margins, ranging from 60-80%, the public supports common democratic positions. So if they're far far left, of whom?
No they really don't, not when you get into the actual issues with actual facts, not bumper sticker rhetoric like "Do you support Reasonable Gun Control" without specifying what they gun control is or "Do you support an assault weapons ban" without saying what an assault weapon is.
On Gun Control most people support the level of Gun Control when having today once they are educated on the actual laws we have, and generally reject the massively expanded democrat policies once they are explained in full to them
Democrat's are good at marketing and pulling the wool over people's eyes
>No one supports infinite immigration, other than some old school extremist libertarians, that's a strawman used to attack Democrats.
Better tell that to the leading democrats as they call for open borders. AOC for example is huge open borders advocate
>widening income inequality, a healthcare affordability crisis, an education affordability crisis, environmental crisis, etc because to address those issues would require the government actually taxing and regulating the winners in the economy, and their stooges in Congress needed to come up with a way to divert people's attention.
That is funny given that all of those problems were caused by government in the first place.
Government creates problems it never solves them
It has become pretty clear that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is not the whole story even if (arguably) some lower signal/noise venues would get fewer random offensive comments even if only because any level of identity verification will get in the way of casual drive-by shitposting.
But I don't really disagree with your basic point. There are nuanced topics I simply won't wade into online--which is probably fine as I probably don't have anything particular to add--as I may enrage someone who will make an issue of it within social/professional circles relevant to me.
Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides.
Not only would require significant evidence, but would need to specifically address the current issue of automated political speech online in order to be taken seriously.
I have yet to see significant evidence proving there is an issue with automated political speech online
I see left activists claim that anyone that disagrees with the authoritarian left to be either "alt-right" or "bot accounts" but little by way of actual evidence
Sure Twitter and other Tech companies like to talk about how they "banned thousands of bot accounts" but they offer not proof on how they came to that conclusion and given the bias of the companies I am not sure they are not just banning libertarian and conservative moderates under the guise of "abolishing bots"
The mechanisms by which they've fought spam and fraud have been documented and there are numerous academic studies on the bot networks, actively tracing Twitter bot accounts back to their country of origin, and tracing by traffic analysis all of the reposts and reshares. You can find lots of papers written on publicly available data on pre-print services, like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291.pdf
It wouldn't take you more than a few minutes to Google for this and read some of the papers instead of speculating in ignorance. The idea that they're somehow detecting libertarian messages and banning them is paranoid conspiracy theory nonsense.
While I do not dispute there are bots out in the world, bots are a convenient excuse for censorship allowing them to also suppress opinions they dislike under the guise of suppressing "bots and spam"
Your assertation that "Google has been fighting spam" as proof is an ironic example of that because Google fights hard to prevent what they call "bad advertisements" which more or less equates to any ads not shown through one of googles many ads networks.
Google Spam == Good
non-google spam == BAD.
Liberal Opinions == Good
non-liberal Opinions == Bots
If you are in the US, then you should understand that Anonymous Speech was the bed rock foundation of this nation, most of the discourse around the constitution was done via anonymous pseudonyms.
The Reality is "Real Names Policies" promote extremism, it does not reduce it. Real Names Policies further create eco chambers, Group isolation, and destroy discourse.
This idea that Anonymous Speech is the cause of extremist is plainly false given that most of the violent extremists post for abhorrent beliefs under their real identities.
Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides. To remove that, is to remove the rational voices and only allow the extremist to yell at each other