Well yes, at least partially. Studies of bans on hate communities on reddit have shown effectiveness not only in reducing the total hate, but also, and this is important, changing the behaviour of individual users who were active in the hate communities as they moved towards more moderate, diverse communities.
[...] "What they found was encouraging for this strategy of reducing unwanted activity on a site like Reddit:
Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent. Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher rates than control groups. Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald). However, within those communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and moderators. All in all, the researchers conclude, the ban was quite effective at what it set out to do:
For the definition of “work” framed by our research questions, the ban worked for Reddit. It succeeded at both a user level and a community level. Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site." [...]
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...
Furthermore, overt hate speech isn't necessarily the problem for society. It matters more for society what beliefs someone holds than what they are willing to express. The Soviet Union is an example of that - people outwardly expressed agreement with the government, but secretly were against it.
Making it harder to cross that first line absolutely matters in making it harder for them to cross the line of becoming an active danger to others.
Considering how hate speech is a very flimsy term, I don't think that this always follows. I do believe that there's likely a correlation, but I doubt it's strong. Some will say that claiming that there are only 2 genders is hate speech, others that claiming that abortion is murder is hate speech. Not to mention that there are many cases where something clearly not hate speech is labeled as hate speech.
In the UK a teenager was arrested for quoting rap song lyrics on an Instagram profile page. This was labeled a hate crime by the prosecutor.[0] Do you think that this makes her more likely to engage in hateful behavior?
Bullies at school often get away with their bullying, because they bully in ways that are not overtly noticeable. They will use terms that aren't offensive to make fun of and hurt others.
Everyone thinks hateful thoughts in brief moments of anger, but very few people ever act on those thoughts or express them. Their whole recruitment process was to get someone to move from just thinking thoughts to acting on them, usually by spreading the message to others. Once you cross that line from thinking to action, the bright line divider is gone--it's all just a matter of degrees of action.
What beliefs people hold in their heads is the result of a multitude of factors and upbringing and it's really beyond our ability and probably not a good idea to think we can somehow turn every racist into a non-racist with sufficient facts and thoughts and prayer or personal coaching.
What we can do is intervene when it comes to racists acting on their racism, be that in the form of public speech acts or even violence, that is to say when they participate in public life, for example on internet platforms.
>The Soviet Union is an example of that - people outwardly expressed agreement with the government, but secretly were against it.
And what happened to the Soviet Union when all those people were able to express their dissent? Nothing good. If you're saying that racists are going to be as empowered by lack of supression as dissidents were in the Soviet Union I'm not sure you're making a great case for ignoring their propaganda.
Don’t get me wrong: they can do as they please. I just don’t personally prefer to live in the world where Reddit is deciding what is hate, what is acceptable, etc.
It seems plausible that they stem from the same or similar social, psychological, and/or moral defects.
Fat shaming is also normal in many Asian countries where they have some of the lowest obesity rates and the longest lifespans in the world.
Yet in places such as UK which does have censorship and hate speech laws, they don't.
I can see the difference, can you?
You make it sound like some slippery slope fallacy, but it's not the same speech. Calling for hate is wrong and should be shuttered in the darkness.
Correct.
Don't bother responding, i don't care about your crazy interpretations.
One of the old favorites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Sport Still didn't stop some people believing it completely though, human nature.
I remember a whole bunch of crazies on usenet in the early-mid 90s but that was an extremely effective filter at keeping them from the rest of the world.
Mormons.
Scientologists.
The benefits of smoking tobacco. The danger of smoking marijuana. (And vice versa, depending on decade.)
The aberrancy/normalcy of homosexuality (take your pick... depends on the decade.)
The vast conspiracy theory that is the Red Mensce. The vast conspiracy that is evil capitalism. (Once again, depends on the decade and locale as to which disinformation campaign is at work.)
Etc.
All of these -- and dozens of others -- thrived pre-internet.
Youtube -- like newspapers before it -- is dying. The ability to host, index, and disseminate video content is spreading st breakneck speed. Youtube is at the point that magazines were several years ago: becoming more and more sanctimonious until it will awake to discover nobody is using their content.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-a...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca... (amp link bypasses paywall)
And that's ok. They don't need that today either.
I'm not sure how scientifically confirmed theories are equivalent to, in many cases overtly disproven, conspiracy theories.
Yeah, I'll take 9/11 truthers over that.
So it could be the case that in the past conspiracy theorists didn't have access to the most dominant media (e.g. broadcast TV) while today they do.
We live in a society.
Historic hypothetical: Do you think Nancy Reagan could have convinced damn near every conceivable jury in the country in that rap music and the views therein caused damage? What does that do your little draft constitutional amendment there?
I think it would not bebhard to find your view damaging, I'm fact your expression of that view gas already caused specific damage to me because you made me sad for you. As well, such pro-censorship expressions threaten the very core of America The Idea, which idea brings a great many positive things and clarity to the world, the loss of which would be obviously damaging to millions.
How would your subversive and damaging views survive in the dystopia you seek?
You think this is better or worse for a country that is sharply and almost exactly evenly polarized across party lines?
Actually, no it hasn't. And for anyone that holds such a viewpoint, I'd strongly suggest reading J. S. Mill's classic, On Liberty[1] -- a foundational document of Western political thought.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Mill's point is this: Every time you silence someone, you are preventing others from hearing what that person has to say. Maybe those people want to listen so they can entertain an idea and become convinced. Maybe they want to listen so they can better understand and refute the speaker. Maybe they just find the rantings of a crazy person amusing. Whatever their reasons, the "cure" of censorship is worse than the "disease" caused by letting people communicate. (Note that this formulation also makes it easy to distinguish speech from "speech" such as air horns designed to disrupt a speaker from spreading their ideas to those who want to listen.)
Moreover, censorship requires designating a censor. Is there any person or group who you would grant the power of deciding what you're allowed to read or hear? I certainly can't think of one. I'm an adult and I can decide for myself what is acceptable for me to consume, thank you very much.
Of course YouTube is not a government and they shouldn't be forced to host things that they don't want to host, but following the free speech norm is almost certainly more beneficial to society. Every once in a while, one of those crazy ideas that must be censored— one of those ideas turns out to be true. Just like slavery and the subjugation of women in the past, there are moral errors we are committing that future societies will condemn us for. Censorship prevents those ideas from coming to light sooner and impedes moral progress.
Warning messages before viewing something? Sure. Add links to rebuttals? Fine. Demonetize? OK. But deletion? I'd prefer you didn't.
"$INSERT_POSITIVE_ADJECTIVE despotism" is still despotism.
So it comes down to each person's belief set - do they believe that despotism is unfortunate when misapplied but is a force for good in the right hands? Or do they instead believe that all forms of control inevitably will get seized by corrupt forces? Or more radically, that the entire concept of control is inherently contradictory when seen in the broader context of us having brains with limited computational power, limited knowledge, forever bounded by time in a locally deterministic universe, and thus any attempt to seize control just furthers the propagation of ignorance that the "benevolent despotists" are ironically trying to eradicate?
The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.
No one should be beholden to the “giants whose shoulders we straddle”. Note that that phrase is actually applied to scientists who developed evidence based theories rather than old “pure thought” silliness.
As far as despotic rule - England had an elected government at the time of the American revolution (not saying that America wasn’t justified), but it’s also worth noting that a large number of the early English colonists left England because they wanted to enforce religious domination that wasn’t legal in England.
That is categorically not true. It said some problematic things about Native Americans for sure, but they could never have gotten away with pro-slavery language in the Declaration. It's a propaganda document that had to unite wide swaths of revolutionary ideologies; abolitionists included.
I assume that you are actually thinking of the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution, which is still more complicated than just "saying slaves aren't people." Counting slaves as people was the slave-owner position, because being counted wasn't about rights or freedom, it was about State power. It was the abolitionist arguing that slaves shouldn't count as people, not to de-humanize them, but to keep the slave-owners from being able to have it both ways.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
Rests on the assumption that slaves are not "men". But something else.
That said the “State power” argument in this case has always been the justification for the treason committed by the confederacy. When faced with a legally elected president, making a legal change that they didn’t like, the confederate states mutinied.
They have retroactively tried to call it the “war of northern aggression” (hint, you committed treason, so it’s not). Then they’ve claimed it was about states rights - if it was, then the Supreme Court would have ruled it unconstitutional, they’ve also never mutinied over anything else.
You're treating two different documents that were written 14 years apart by two diffent, though strongly overlapping, groups of people as if they were statements someone made back to back. Did Thomas Jefferson believe the words "All Men" included the slaves he owned when he penned those words? Fuck no! But he still wrote the words in a way that men who did believe that "All Men" meant ALL men could get behind it. Compare this to how he describes the Natives.
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
By examining the nuance, you can start to see a fuller shape of the society. Slavery was a hot button issue that was left unspoken until the moment it unquestionably has to be addressed. The Native Americans are considered savage and warlike, and that is an uncontroversial view.
I understand the impulse to fight back against whitewashed history, but throwing out all nuance isn't helpful no matter what cause it is in service to.
I genuinely don't think universal free speech is the answer, because people aren't confronted with the counterargument until they seek it out. If you could guarantee that argument, it would be much safer. But I don't think it's possible with today's media; people exist in a bubble of both their own choosing and algorithmic choosing, and aren't challenged.
Universal free speech as it stands, allows racism and with that, you are not wrong. Free speech within some moral boundaries, though free debate, that is the aspect of free speech to provide balance that is equally important.
When you do start censoring them, we will all start losing faith in our values as we don’t apply it across the board.
If you look at other non free countries, the average person doesn’t really believe that you have the right to express your views. Take the Muhammad cartoons for example, a vast majority of Muslims in non-western countries think that’s a no go from a rights perspective ( as in, you shouldn’t even have the right to draw it). That kind of thinking extends and extends to all kinds undermining of individual rights. If you look at China, the vastness of inaction to their Internet being censored is another key example of this. It takes a lot to get a society to value it, and we worked pretty hard to get those values ingrained in our culture.
There might be some absolutely abhorrent people in our country, but even they cannot deny that they do have the right to express themselves here. We lose that baseline integrity of our values when we start withering it away, until we ourselves can’t even recognize ourselves anymore, where suddenly we have all these caveats to a principle that defines our society.
This is taking away their access to a platform that has global reach. They already had platforms where they didn't engage in debate, btw; they're called youtube channels with heavily-moderated chat sections. Except there they can reach millions of people.
You also won't stop such types of content from appearing on said platforms, less popular but still they will appear, get popular and get closed down. But that's an issue with some types of content that all social media platforms have.
No solution will be 100%, let's not presume that there will ever be 100% solution. Though is this the best approach. Exposing and debating head on would be the better solution and this eliminates that.
ugh there are literally people who think the Earth is flat. There are literally people who think the Earth is flat!
True, should they ban that as well? Though they havn't been going around flattening mountains or any other harm, so there is that.
Not all those who believe conspiracy stuff, act upon it. Some will, those are more the ones who will engage in lesser, more niche platforms in which such content will run, along with more such content. Thus, driving many who will want to watch it to be exposed to other platforms in which such content is less tacked as more echo chambers and this is not something to be overlooked.
Thing is, whatever you do, there will always be some and with so many humans, the odds of there being more than one is a given. Do you ridicule/educate in public or cast aside to dark corners in which they can carry on unchecked.
Maybe the right action for this, maybe not. Hard to really measure it beyond cell tower death rates and I'm fairly sure we have past the peak upon that surge.
The way these Youtubers work is to cast as wide of a net as possible as quickly as possible to hook a small percentage of followers who they exploit consistently with newer and wilder beliefs.
By pushing them "under ground" you effectively take away their means of spreading and protect the masses in the process.
We already have this. It's called 4chan and 8chan.
And you know what? It's absolutely better to keep this shit to their echo chamber, where they have limited exposure, than Youtube, where they have a potential audience of billions.
Good. YouTube doesn’t need to be promoting every flavor of garbage known to man. That’s why the rest of the internet exists.
This will just shift this extremist content to other unregulated and unmonitored platforms that will not engage in debate, but blindly accept such things.
After all, if people believe this kinda stuff, cutting of the head won't stop them believing, just shifts the problem out of the public glare, at least on the surface.