We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community.
It's been a slow boil. But things are different now than they were years ago. Not just because the community has grown but (at least from my perspective) because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly.
We at least are fortunate to have the capability to build tools to identify behavior that might be an issue even without taking automated action. But "I'm not touching you" behavior is sometimes hard to catch when people avoid certain key words, at least until confronted. It's a pain, really.
Over the time I've used it (94 to 2020) it's shifted radically, it used to be kooky, niche, fun or just weird (and it is still that on the edges) but by and large rarely mean/cruel, the main sites are just a torrent of bile spouted by morons venting their spleen at the universe.
Comment sections on any news article, youtube videos - pretty much everywhere outside of heavily moderated forums and the like are vile.
It's one of the reasons I visit a few heavily moderated subject specific sub-reddits, this place and IRC and ignore literally everything else (I have comment sections nuked in ublock origin).
I respect anyone who voluntarily wades through that crap honestly.
I do moderate https://old.reddit.com/r/realminimalism/ but no-one has ever gotten the joke.
As a community grows the probability that it includes disruptive assholes approaches 1. Unmoderated communities do not scale.
I think that a lot of communities had a passion for cultivating a freedom of expression, but actually had a lot of unspoken/unrealized rules in mind.
In my opinion a lot of communities would gain a lot by a flashing banner "We decide what content we want on our platform and we will take arbitrary action to protect our choices". In practice is what social media companies are doing now even if they cannot state it as such (in part for legal reasons and in part for marketing reasons)
Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is right. When we censor, we're saying that our ideas should be determined by who has the power to enforce censorship, not by compassion and truth.
How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been? Especially on the web? My impression is that fascist/racist ideas aren't spread in open debates where the truth matters, but indirectly: through deniable memes and dog whistles initially, then slowly, as people's innate defenses are lowered, through many stages of more and more open exposition.
> Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is right. When we censor, we're saying that our ideas should be determined by who has the power to enforce censorship, not by compassion and truth.
I think you're conflating censorship with exclusion, which every functioning social group needs to engage in to some degree.
Also, comparisons at very abstract levels aren't very enlightening in this case. You really have to get into the details to make a true comparison.
When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black people peacefully hand in hand with ministers in their Sunday best, walking toward Selma and remaining nonviolent even as they were met with violence.
When straight people saw gay people as dangerous deviants, Harvey Milk showed them gay people in their families, jobs, and neighborhoods, behaving like the normal people they are. I personally grew up in a church that taught homophobia--my own opinions were fundamentally changed by one of my friends coming out in high school.
Ask yourself your own question: when has censorship ever been effective?[1] I'd argue that, among other things the election of Trump is partly a backlash against attempts to control speech by the left. It's no mistake that a big part of the pro-Trump narrative was just that he "spoke his mind".
[1] Whenever I ask this question, people always respond by pointing to one study which showed banning a few hate subreddits decreased hate speech on Reddit, so I'll preemptively respond to that by saying that there's absolutely no evidence that bigots on Reddit didn't simply move to Voat at that time.
> Back in the 1960s, when King was actually leading protests, just 36 percent of white Americans thought he was helping “the Negro cause of civil rights,” according to historical polling data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. In a 1966 Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of the public rated King more negatively than positively.
> After King was assassinated, two-thirds of Americans said their strongest reaction to his death had been sadness, anger, shame or fear, another survey found. Another 31 percent, however, said they “felt he brought it on himself.”
Harvey Milk was also not necessarily popular amongst Americans, and a few years after his death we would have total mainstream paranoia about AIDS. The end of the US's majority disapproval of gay marriage only came about in 2010. [1]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-ame...
[1] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
Change isn't a popularity contest. If King changed views on black voting rights from 20% for to 40% for, that's a pretty massive change.
It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.
> It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.
Yes, but that's a fairly useless fact if you don't have any explanation for why that happened.
How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?
The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is.
> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?
Is there a reason you can't post memes with the truth? Anti-racist memes work just fine. In a similar vein, infographics have been extremely effective. The internet is one of the best tools for spreading the truth in existence.
Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they wouldn't bother with dog whistles, they would just say, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? And if someone says "Black people are criminals", I can respond with, "While black people are convicted of crimes at a higher per-capita rate than white people, this is a result of poverty: black people and white people at similar income levels commit similar numbers of crimes."
What do you do when someone posts a subtly racist meme that hints that black people commit more crimes? Censor harder? The solution you're proposing takes us to a place where racists just agree on what codewords mean what in their own private spaces, say whatever they want in public using their secret codewords, and call us crazy if we figure it out and censor them.
The internet is a fundamentally different communications mechanism than TV or newspapers. Reasoning about internet forum social dynamics using pre-computer examples, is like reasoning about modern infantry tactics citing victories from ancient Greek history. A hoplite phalanx would be annihilated by a WWII German infantry battalion.
> Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they would just, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship?
Sorry, no. You're conflating censorship with exclusion again. "Censorship" didn't create those things; they were created by the widespread rejection and condemnation of the underlying racist ideas and the racist people who hold them. Earnest, up-front advocacy of racism isn't going to be effective in a population that's been primed to identify and reject it, so racists setup recruiting funnels with obscured entrances to spread their ideology by radicalizing people more slowly. That situation won't change, and the racists won't abandon their subtly racist memes and dog whistles, unless racism becomes respectable in polite company, which would be much worse than what we have now.
1. When has censorship been effective?
2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?
And I'll add a question I haven't asked yet:
3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc. in your censorship plan?
I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.
The reason I'm asking the third question: I hear your point that I'm talking about exclusion rather than censorship, and I agree that racism becoming respectable in polite company would be much worse than what we have now. But I think you have to realize that the way we got to a point where racism isn't respectable in polite company is repeated, persistent confrontation of racism with the truth. The reason you and I know that black people aren't criminals, is that we both know the more nuanced truth. I know I didn't come up with that truth myself--I heard it from someone else, and I heard it in the context of confronting the racist trope that black people are criminals. I get the temptation to use censorship as a shortcut to remove subtle racism, but by doing that we're giving up something even more fundamental: the very debate that made racism not respectable in the first place.
And make no mistake: racism isn't respectable in polite company in our little internet bubbles full of tech and startup people, but racism is absolutely respectable in many communities in our country and the world. If we're going to make racism not respectable in those places, censorship isn't going to work. We're going to have to have conversations that make that happen. If we let those conversations happen in public spaces, we can have those conversations in spaces that are friendly to us. But if we censor those conversations, then we just push those communities out, and then our only option is to go into those communities to have those conversations, which is much more difficult. And to be clear: censorship won't work in those communities, because we don't have the power to censor there.
> 1. When has censorship been effective?
> 2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?
> ...I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.
How can I answer them directly, when I think they're based misunderstandings? For instance, I don't classify many of the things you seem to be talking about as "censorship" (e.g. banning /r/The_Donald from reddit) despite your persistent use of that term, nor have I offered up any "plans" of any kind, let alone "[my] censorship plan."
> 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc....
Education coupled with regular refreshers/responses as needed. If you want to teach kids anti-Nazism, it's not like you have to first invite an open and earnest Nazi to school to lecture the kids in class about how the Jews are subhuman and corrupt everything, etc. The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly.
1. When has a silencing action similar to the banning of /r/The_Donald been effective in reducing bigotry and/or fascism?
2. Your criticism of free speech is that it allows people to post subtly racist memes and dog whistles, but you haven't presented an alternative. How do you plan to deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?
I'm putting in an effort to use terminology that's amenable to you, so please put in an effort to understand my questions and answer them, rather than objecting to semantics.
> > 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc....
> Education coupled with regular refreshers/responses as needed. If you want to teach kids anti-Nazism, it's not like you have to first invite an open and earnest Nazi to school to lecture the kids in class about how the Jews are subhuman and corrupt everything, etc. The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly.
Let's be clear: no one is proposing we bring earnest and open Nazis into schools. We're both on the same side: we both want to stop Nazis. So let's keep this on topic and avoid straw man arguments.
The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly, but in that teaching, you have to teach people the Nazi ideology, otherwise they don't know what they're actually against. And you need to keep that up-to-date, otherwise people are defended against what Nazis were saying 10 years ago. Nazism changes and adapts and we have to adapt to fight it. And if we're constantly paying attention to and responding to what Nazis are saying now, that starts to look suspiciously like just having an uncensored conversation.
If we don't do this, we run the risk of creating a generation of anti-fascists who can't recognize fascism if it doesn't have a swastika on it. This is already a problem: check out Dianne Feinstein, for example.
I don't feel like I did this question justice with my previous answer.
The most obvious example would be the George Floyd video, and in a larger sense, the extremely effective tool of filming police as they harass, plant evidence on, beat, and murder the people they're supposed to serve. In the current situation, I think the results of that video speak for themselves.
In response to the pervasive narrative that focuses on looters and not on cops murdering black people (I linked to five minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s This tends to be persuasive in my experience.
This doesn't address racism because it's a white guy, but I find it's effective in getting people to take the complete lack of police accountability more seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc That officer (Philip Brailsford) was acquitted in a trial where the prosecutor moved to strike the video from evidence, and then the officer was rehired by Mesa Police briefly, before being given early medical retirement based on a claim of PTSD from the murder, earning him a $2500/mo pension.
Watch any of those videos that you haven't seen, and see how that feels, and realize that that's how they make people who were on the fence about these issues feel.
That second video is revolting. I don't think I can correctly articulate my thoughts after watching that.
Wow. Just wow.
You're literally saying that because they're not playing our game, we should let fascists control what game is played.
Look at Daryl Davis's amazing work getting over 200 klansmembers to turn away from the klan through honest conversation.
Is it easy? Of course not. But it's not impossible to reach people - it happens every day.
(I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion" is itself bannable.)