I should preface this by saying that I'm kind of a "strict Constitutionalist" so to speak.

In my view all these arguments people are making about "open environments", or "bad faith actors", or extremism or what have you are completely irrelevant. A privately owned, NON-governmental, environment is allowed to be as "open" or as "closed" as they please. If a "bad faith actor" wants to act in "bad faith", (whatever that is?), then that's their prerogative. That's their Constitutional liberty. (You ever consider this? Who, exactly, is defining what "bad faith" is anyway?) And extremism in content is fine, you don't like it, don't look at it. (Or in Facebook's case, don't have it on your system. That's fine. That's FB's Constitutional liberty.)

The Constitution really does provide room for obvious solutions to all of the arguments people are making. There's really no need to get bent out of shape about a lot of these things.

The trouble is that today, these companies have a monopoly on distribution. People who are banned go to other sites that capture extremists views (Gab/Voat/4chan).

At some point, platforms need to realize there is a moral value in allowing different view points so that they can discuss and be seen. Otherwise, people leave for more "open" platforms that breed exclusive extremism. It then further divides the split.

The other issue is that these platforms are so big that they literally dictate narrative in many cases, or at least to their audiences.

>The trouble is that today, these companies have a monopoly on distribution. People who are banned go to other sites that capture extremists views (Gab/Voat/4chan)...

If the banned go to Gab and 4chan, then there is no "monopoly" on distribution. The Constitution is what allows for the alternative options to even exist. It's GOOD that we have the alternative options. That's not a "bad" thing.

And what is wrong with people going to "open" platforms that "breed exclusive extremism"? I don't see anything Constitutionally wrong with that. (Keep in mind, you or I not liking something does not mean it should be Constitutionally restricted.)

What is the moral value in allowing group X to threaten the very existence of group Y? I don't mean saying that group Y should be kicked off Platform.com, I mean threatening to kill group Y IRL.

The problem is that an open environment cannot work when there are bad faith interlocutors actively seeking to undermine that open environment. There's a famous Sartre quote that deals with the paradox of tolerance in regards to anti-semites.

Either they are presenting valid arguments or they aren't. If you have the mental tools to analyze and quickly dismiss arguments it doesn't matter if they aren't acting in good faith.

> Either they are presenting valid arguments or they aren't.

I agree. But one problem with bad-faith actors is they can bring productive discussion to a near standstill, due to the time / attention / emotional-energy costs.

That's absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting

Except they are not censored. If these groups feel like they want to espouse these dangerous ideas they still can. They don't need Facebook to do and the rest of us can ignore them. But at the moment Facebook's and Youtube's algorithms put some of this crap front and center in your browser. To the unsuspecting this can seem like validating and endorsing those ideas.

Are you really saying that these groups aren't going to be censored by Facebook? Censorship does not require a government.

These groups aren't censored, full dead stop. Corporations have a TOS. IF you don't like it you can take your speech elsewhere. Governments are different. You are free to chose a private platform other than Facebook, Apple, Google. You are not free to chose a different government.

The definition of "censorship" applies to contexts other than government so it's not clear what argument you are making.

They are free to express this content on any other platform, including their own.

Does that include platforms like Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, which:

>can not accept cash donations via any payment processor

>has had their domains revoked from multiple providers

>is only barely able to be able to protected from (numerous, expected) DDoS attacks due to being kicked off Cloudflare, etc.

There comes a point when a person is not free to express their content on any platform on the web despite a lack of government censorship.

I want to be sympathetic to this sort of thing in the general sense. I really do.

But... I'm not at all sad that Daily Stormer has trouble staying online.

Free speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want. It doesn't mean that anyone has to give you a platform to say your piece. It doesn't mean that people can't react negatively to what you say. It doesn't mean that there are no consequences to what you say.

Assuming there is reasonable diversity in your options for platforms[0], and yet you still can't find a place for your speech, maybe you're just an irredeemable asshole and should change your views[1].

[0] The current availability of this is certainly debatable.

[1] Maybe you're not and you actually are being unjustly oppressed and censored. But I don't believe that's the case with the Daily Stormer.

Free speech is an interesting ideal but historically there's always been "acceptable speech" and "discouraged speech", where discouragement comes on a spectrum between "outright banned and prison" to "people don't invite you to parties".

In hunter-gatherer days if you had extremely antisocial ideology your tribe probably just left you in the desert and you died.

You are proving the OPs point. No government compelled cloudflare to stop providing services for the daily stormer. They stopped because most people don’t want services from your neighborhood white supremacy DNS provider and that was what cloudflare would be known as if they did.

Should the government compell private internet service firms to service anyone?

An argument can be made that if the ability to use the web is a human right[1] then yes, governments have a responsibility to ensure their citizens can actually use it. You can make an analogy to (private) providers of healthcare denying coverage to patients they find disagreeable.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/4/12092740/un-resolution-con...

In what ways are domain name services analogues to healthcare?

Both can be true. These platforms are censoring and people are free to go to other platforms.

Of course! But when China says you're free to discuss the Free Tibet movement in any other country but China, we rightly call it censorship. What makes this any different? Or, I suppose, what makes the differences one of kind and not of degree?

In a lot of ways, Facebook is as much of a country as the Vatican is.

The analogy holds no water, it is infinitely easier to broadcast your speech on another platform (or make your own platform) than to deal with state level censorship. Publishing them on a company's dime and expecting platform neutrality is preposterous.

It's not easy to make a new platform. it's insanely difficult. These big social media companies have huge moats at this point, due to network effects and scale.

When other things have such powerful network effects we force them, through the state, to treat people fairly. For instance, utilities like water and electricity are natural monopolies because of the limited physical space for the infrastructure. Social networks aren't quite the same but there are powerful similarities.

They are indeed differences of degree, not kind. I don't know of any culture that has embodied 100% free speech through-and-through, it's all degrees of what you can say and what you can't.

The key difference is the penalty: is it going to jail or some people roll their eyes and stop being your friend?

I don't think it's ever going to be "people enthusiastically try to understand your positions and respect them". That has been the ideal in the US, but historically I can't find the pages in a history book where it's been largely true.

> Of course! But when China says you're free to discuss the Free Tibet movement in any other country but China, we rightly call it censorship. What makes this any different?

If you talk about a Free Tibet in China, you risk having your legs broken and your family put in camps.

If you violate Facebook's ToS, you might get banned from their website. Then you can just type literally any other website into your address bar and be on your way.

I would really appreciate if people making terminology arguments could cluster int he same subthread instead of (likely inadvertently) resetting numerous individual subthreads with the same point.

You don't solve nazi ideology with reasoned debate. You don't solve it with deplatforming either but I doubt facebook is going to start throwing bricks so I'll take it.

And of course as long as you agree with FB's determination of who is a Nazi and who isn't, it's all fine and peachy?

If they overreach then we circle back, basic iterative process. I see nothing in their statement to indicate that they're going to overreach.

"Move fast and break things" doesn't quite work even in the SV bubble. Letting somebody as demonstrably immoral as Zuck do it in real life does not look like a good idea.

Better not let him iterate the overreach in the first place.

Not if 'not iterating' means letting literal Nazis have a soapbox in the tech equivalent of the town square.

Even assuming that this premise were true, FB, Google, or any other tech company deciding who is a "literal Nazi" is a terrible idea.

And of all the ways FB is making the world worse, "letting Nazis have a soapbox" is least of their problems.

> You don't solve nazi ideology with reasoned debate.

How did you reach that conclusion?

1940-1945

Total non sequitur, low effort post. The mods are really showing their bias in this thread.

People respond with their best arguments when they are confronted with bad ideas.

People respond with censorship attempts and violence when they are scared that their own positions are weak.

There was reasoned debate from ballpark 1932-1938, when the Nazis have roughly 40% of the vote to go into a coalition government then somehow levered that into total control of the German state but that's more evidence for your argument.

Yes, exactly my point.

History repeats itself and people on the left want to pretend you solve this problem with the debate club.

Are you advocating for violence against "nazis?"

Yes, it's like book burning. It makes the banned content more enticing. This is the big issue with New Zealand banning the recent shooters manifesto. What if news organizations want to read it to report on it (even if it is just to say, this is why he's a nutjob)? Banning his manifesto grants it more important. It shows the government is afraid of it for some reason.

Mein Kampf is still available for purchase in NZ. I've personally looked through his manifesto and think it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements. If you understand people like that, maybe you can identify them early on, or encourage attitudes in general that would prevent those xenophobic ideas from developing.

You can get a waiver from the NZ censor for having copies of that material if you're a scholar or researcher: https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/latest-news/ch...

it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements

How about the explicit calls for assassination of specific individuals, among other direct incitements to terrorism?

> You can get a waiver from the NZ censor

The fact that NZ has a censor is abhorrent.

US has censored fundamentalist Muslim extremist material in concert with Twitter and Google since at least 2009.

Where were the free speech advocates back then? And why are they so vocal now that the extremists are a different skin color?

Twitter and Google are not government entities and can remove any content they want. That does not make the content illegal.

Copycat violence is a thing, when you offer people to make a political statement and then get immortalized, history has proven that people will take you up on that.

Secondly regarding the most recent NZ manifesto, it isn't a well argued thesis as much as a dump of memes and shitposting.