Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
And even some lefties!
The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.
Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.
[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.
The Left typically wants to silence/ignore while the Right typically wants to fight/berate about it.
Also, "berating" is a kind word. We're talking about "I have the right to exist" vs "we should systematically exterminate/enslave people like you"
You can read their speech policy: https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf
These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.
Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.
The left does this on Reddit/Twitter constantly towards right wing people and no one bats an eye. It's like maybe those in power are extremely biased towards the left.
Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those in positions of power currently.
I agree with you. We are talking about how targeted groups will demand moderation to avoid persistent targeted harassment from a comparatively small number of people.
Conservatives are also often targets of hate. There are black, Jewish, gay, and trans conservatives who are also targeted not for the content of their politics, but due to attributes they were born with and cannot change. I can always set aside my politics, but one cannot set aside their race, gender identity or ethnic group.
Since the discussion is the sociological cause, the fact that the group doing the harassing is small, it will nearly always be banned by the larger majority that is targeted.
I agree. One thing to note though is it's one thing to remove bad law such as outlawing homosexuality as such and it's another to try to force everyone to promote you're life style. Harassment is bad. One problem is that there is no agreed to standard of harassment. So a lot of the left don't like that as a Catholic I will not promote or think that a homosexual lifestyle is something positive. This is not harassment nor is them disliking Catholics and saying mean things about our people and positions.
I think how people react to your positions is a very different discussion than the sociological and political questions we've discussed so far though.
A comparison can be made to other positions which may be a tad extreme here, but I think it's arguably appropriate. If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room. However, even if attempts are made to persuade said people with logical arguments, often they will continue to hold such beliefs to the same strength or even stronger than before.
Is it appropriate to silence people for holding specific views? No. But ultimately some compromise has to be made. A decent solution may be the use of a debate section, but I'm sure better ones exist.
The problem is that no one online has any sense of nuance. Any questioning of the absolute worst prediction, or disagreement about public policy regarding it are looked down on as climate change denialism.
Secondly, that argument has a lot of baggage associated with it. Transgender people get banned from the military because they 'cannot change their sex' or 'transgender people lose their jobs because they don't conform'. It's an argument around taking away the rights of a certain group of people and it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to associate with that.
But at the same time, do you not see how this reinforces existing disparities in opportunity and social acceptance? If you have a better solution than mandating that businesses don't discriminate, I'm all ears. However, if you simply allow businesses to freely discriminate, then the world will only become more unfair over time.
I would never agree to take away rights from a Catholic, but it's disappointing to see a Catholic argue to take away rights from someone else using their faith as a bludgeon. Especially when I know many Catholics whom treat gay people the same as everyone else.
What exactly do you mean by "scientific position"? The term seems, to me, an absurdity.
> Doesn't make it okay.
Putting aside any actual wrongdoing, attacking those with privilege is infinitely better than attacking those without: the former have the resources to defend themselves; the latter do not.
In the same way your stance on climate change is a scientific position regardless if your stance is correct or not.
> the former have the resources to defend themselves; the latter do not.
It's still an evil to unjustly attack someone even if to different degrees.
Can you please just give the definition of "scientific position" that you are using?
Do you mean an assertion regarding reality? Because I think everyone agrees on the reality. The question of what the words "sex" and "gender" constitute is not a question of reality: it is a question of social and legal constructs.
> It's still an evil to unjustly attack someone even if to different degrees.
Yep.
A position that's ignorant of actual medical science is a "scientific" position?
As for vitriol against billionaires and cops, taking a stand against people abusing power is as American as the Boston tea party. If you're advocating for people to shut up and take the abuse you sound pretty authoritarian to me. Is it that hard to look at the situation and say "give me liberty or give me death" applies to poor people and black people too?
I'll let James Baldwin do the talking:
No I never said that nor do I think it. There are definite problems with some cops and there are many instances of gross abuse. I have no problem with billionaires.
Sounds pretty authoritarian to me.
Maybe because sex is a more accurate term.
> don't actually address that you're uncomfortable that some people don't fit into the social boxes of male and female.
So? What's your point? Male and female on not simple social boxes. There are real biological and physical differences between them.
"People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right. It is rare on the far left; not that it's non-existent, but there just aren't that many sincere Stalinists or similar left.
What dehumanising content are you seeing from the left? I mean, if it's just "the other side are bad people" stuff, well, everyone does that. The "these classes of people should be socially and politically suppressed" stuff is overwhelmingly from one side, though.
What? Not that there is no one with this view but it is an extreme minority. Same with people calling for the killing of all cops on the left, very small minority.
Just look at the recent supreme court ruling that made it illegal to fire people based on you being gay or transgendered. Tons of conservatives shot back on that one. I don't know how you can look at a viewpoint like, "yes, employers should be allowed to fire you for merely being gay" and think that that doesn't mean they want to keep marginalised people marginalised.
1 - https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
As far as I can tell, there are no politicians or indeed anyone with significant power calling for the killing of all cops.
Unless Nancy Pelosi or someone starts retweeting videos demanding the liquidation of the kulak class, you'll forgive me if I don't take your claims of 'extreme minority on both sides' all that seriously.
The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.
And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".
The far right thinks black people are flatly inferior, and tolerate or encourage violence and oppression against them because of this.
The far left's attitude toward white people is "it's bad that white people are dominant in society because of historical/structural racism", even in cases like affirmative action the clear goal is eventual equality, not that they want white people to end up structurally oppressed instead.
If you can't see the difference in how toxic each of these attitudes are, I'm afraid I can't help you.
But I'd love to see you explain how the left is apparently bigoted against straight people.
I've never once heard a 'leftist' advocate for the murder of men, whites, straight people, conservatives, or rural dwellers (although, to be fair, occasionally the police). However, growing up and still when I visit home, I regularly hear how black people, queer people, and just liberals in general, aren't worthy of being left alive. These sides are not equivalent, no matter how desperately you want them to be.
Also, my induction into these liberal circles went so far as "you want people to be treated equally? cool.". I didn't have to hand in my cis-white-man card and tattoo an anarchy symbol. In fact, we regularly talk about all sorts of controversial subjects. My friends often enjoy hearing what it was like to grow up in the world of pocket knives and bar fights. I take my communist friends out to shoot guns. Ask me how many of my rural friends have ever asked to experience life among the queers?
You're comparing a rose bush with thorns to a semi-automatic rifle in terms of aggression towards the other party.
Are you really suggesting that confederate leaders are republican heros? And if-so... are you acknowledging that republicans admire and would like to celebrate treasonous bigots that went to war against the United States so that they could own slaves?
Sounds to me like you're admitting that the platform of the republican party is literally that of racists. So, in that way, I understand why these groups would respond to being oppressed by racists with violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3n-cI4wXCM&feature=youtu.be...
Depends on how relevant you consider a social "scientist" having build a career on creating a bogeyman on mixing up nationalism, extreme right and white supremacy. A former columnist at "Huffington Post", she is now writing a book on "Undoing White Womanhood". Calls herself a "change agent" on her own webiste.
Sounds rather like "anti-White" activist to me, like an intellectual Robin DiAngelo.
So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.
I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.
I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.
or duplicate accounts to give the illusion of larger numbers.
For example there are a lot of Reddit accounts created with in the 3 months or so very active on the same post pushing the same agenda.
In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.
The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.
Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.
I think this is similar to the economics of spam: the cost of spamming is so low that even if a small fraction of a percent respond and convert, it's still profitable to spam.
People who troll are just looking to rile people up. All they need is one or two people to respond (out of hundreds or thousands or more). Even someone who knows better will occasionally be triggered enough to respond to a troll.
I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.
I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.
I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.
Deplatforming has been the go to method of the right for at least a century (see mccarthyism) and longer if you include lynching/death as essentially equivalent (ie: you can't speak if you're dead). The left has simply finally got enough critical mass to do it themselves.
- people who disagree with the restrictions of other places on principle and want a freer alternative
- people who can't say what they want to anywhere else, because it's generally disliked
and most people probably do not want to read stuff from the second group.
This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.
It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.
Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.
I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.
The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.
When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.
Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.
Consider two possible statements:
1. Hitler wasn't that bad.
2. Stalin wasn't that bad.
I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.
This has two effects:
Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"
Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.
Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular.
Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off.
I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)
Far-right definitely stand their ground, and can easily go unfazed by logical arguments.
Dicks fuck pussies. We need assholes to shit on the dicks.
Is it because:
- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?
- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.
- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?
I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.