As a person who was born in a country that tried implementing equal outcomes for 70 years, and ended up with extreme corruption, poverty and social distrust, I don't want to see another round of this happen here. So I am hoping that if enough reasonable people acknowledge the problem, the society will reach some sort of a compromise before the lives of several generations are completely wasted, like they were in the USSR. And having platforms where this sort of discussion is not considered "cancerous" is a very important step IMHO.
That's the tip of the iceberg though. There's a whole industry of wrapping this narrative into struggle session-like training while charging 7 figures to various-level budgets. You can find many examples like [1] if you search for Chris Rufo. Except adults sort of understand that it's a kickback-driven nonsense and don't take it seriously. So now they are taking the Critical Race Theory with very similar postulates into schools.
It's not about helping minorities learn from the more successful, and reach for the stars. That's purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them, rather than building on top of that.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200715192955im_/https://nmaahc...
[1] https://christopherrufo.com/cult-programming-in-seattle/
That poster was at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, where you might expect to learn the differences between African-American culture and the dominant White-Anglo-American Culture. Context is important. In no way it implied that "Enlightenment-age values ... should be opposed." Also, it's kind of ironic to be cheering for the takedown of speech you didn't like on a thread where you complain about the silencing of the speech you do like. If you don't like what the poster said or how it said it, maybe oppose it with more speech.
About the whole industry of "training while charging 7 figures" isn't that just how the pendulum swings right now? Before it was prayer meetings and then survivalist tactics for team-building. Plus most employment in the US is at-will, so I suppose if employees don't like it, they are free to find other employers. Freedom cuts both ways too. Also, what's wrong with 7 figures? I thought the free-market and entrepreneurs charging for the value they bring to willing buyers were all good things.
When you conclude it's "purely about making kids hate what their parents did for them", well, that's the kind of hyperbole that's hard to take seriously. It is totally free of argument or evidence, and it sounds so much like the conservatives of the 50's and 60's about how the peace-activists, civil rights leaders, and hippies were going to turn their sons and daughters against their parents.
It always does. Each time someone proclaims equity, they carve out some sort of exception for themselves and their family. Like the mayor of Chicago that mysteriously had heavy police presence around her home, while ordering them to stand down everywhere else.
[0] https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2020/8/20/21377608/li...
Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? Is the argument that there isn't an authoritarian left? I'm referring to this basic model [0]
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Po...
Well, that kind of people now want to run our entire society this way. They want you to be that loyal mediocrity, infinitely thankful for the handout, and supporting their cause without questioning.
Believe me, it's a road to nowhere. Corporate mediocrities end up taking antidepressants for life, or killing themselves after the boss gets fired and they have zero shot at paying that mortgage. The life of self-improvement, hard work and achievement is 1000x more rewarding and I'm glad more people are starting to realize that.
We need more people like you speaking up though. Because virtually every criticism from outside the minorities is now almost unconditionally labeled racist.
I would disagree with that. Kids from the families with inherited wealth always enjoyed their hilltop mansions, gated communities, private schools and Ivy League admissions by donation. And they continue doing that, they're above the rules. Nobody is going to put a low barrier social housing in their backyard, or force their kids to network with us, the plebs.
It's the middle class that made their own wealth is under attack now. Doctors, engineers, small business founders. Apparently, we can't have in a community with no used needles near the playgrounds. Because poor homeless. I can't apparently spend time teaching my pre-school kids to read and to write, so once they go to school, they can focus on more advanced stuff with other like minded kids. For the sake of social justice, the class has to be diluted by a few troublemakers whos parents didn't care. But, of course, not the class where the Governor's kids go.
Mind you, nobody will mind if you go and help the affected people directly. Go offer free counseling to homeless. Go teach Python to kids from poor families. Go do lemonade stand projects with underrepresented minorities. But do it in your own free time and at your own expense. I am pretty certain, many reasonable people will follow, since our society generally values being generous and positive. Except that's not what the activists are doing. They don't want to solve the problem in their free time, they want others to somehow find time and solve the problem for them.
>See, e.g. Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson urging their followers to doxx and threaten their critics.
I've seen the piece from Tucker Carlson. NYT journalists threatened to publish his home address. He stated that it already happened before, leading to threats to his family, and said that if they do it again, he will retaliate. He didn't mention any personal details there, so the NYT pulled back and they've reached a stalemate.
>See, for example, Hollywood, the NBA, the music industry, etc.
Hollywood has deteriorated to releasing heavily engineered comic book films. The art aspect is gone, the creativity is gone, many genres like parody/comedy are gone. Mainstream music isn't at it's peak either. It's pretty consistent with the left-leaning big tech, that focuses on making people replaceable drones following procedures, because they have much less bargaining power this way. I am not into sports, so no clue on NBA/NFL.
People call that kind of twisting of facts and words "cancerous" because it is. You could argue reasonably that attempts to address current inequity are misguided or have gone too far, but not by misrepresenting what people believe.
"When your content is too cancerous for church, maybe the issue isn't the church".
Feel free to replace church with whatever is appropriate to your situation, but there have always been censors and there will always be people who resist the censors. The censors have acted against homosexuals, trans folk, hippies, anti-war demonstrators and many others who we no longer see fit to censor today and I will continue to be in the camp of people who work to thwart the censors.
You’re either a censor or you’re not. If you want a censored platform, say it; if you want an uncensored site, say that.
And said hate peddlers then complain that they don't have the reach they enjoyed on Twitter, Youtube and Facebook... well d'oh. Turns out one who is not a Nazi, a journalist reporting about them, or an antifa activist collecting information wants to spend their free time on a platform dominated by Nazis.
You're describing illegal content. Nobody is objecting to taking that down. Everyone else is talking about censoring legal content.
There was very little sign of intelligence. I had no urge to go back.
For example, it's been well known for awhile that if you subscribe to any of the men's rights subs, you are auto-banned from several of the feminism ones (including TwoXChromosomes). That kind of thing certainly isn't lenient but also isn't under Reddit's control.
It does not matter what the content of the comment was, of course. What matters is the fact you left the bubble and interacted with a different one, you traitorous scum.
I can think of no faster way to stifle innovation, research, and the human spirit.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a33ep/orlando-shooting-r...
To push the analogy to the extreme, consuming illegal pornography doesn't actually harm anyone, the production does, however the consumption drivers production, therefore the consumption does harm.
I agree.
Lots of legal gray area ones that revolve around data hoarding / archiving are constantly threatened and sometimes taken down for piracy. The subreddits try to police the most blatant piracy but due to the nature of why people archive/hoard data it can be difficult.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvygwq/reddits-piracy-sub...
/r/datahoarders and /r/opendirectories are a couple other I personally have seen similar things happen. In my opinion they're a couple of the greatest subreddits out there so the fact that they could be banned out of nowhere on a technicality is a little concerning.
Luckily most of these groups are tech savvy enough to run their own IRC servers.
I'd way rather read a good-faith, well written exploration into a controversial topic, than someone who toes the mainstream line of acceptable opinions entirely while being rude and belligerent.
Other places on the list are much more reasonable.
The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.
Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
The parent poster simply said that they want to join communities free of (or, mostly free of) hate speech and that being free/mostly free of hate speech is an attractive quality for them.
Not once did they advocate for denying infrastructure or any of the other things your entire comment is based on. In fact, they stated the opposite.
And their own app stores.
And their own apps.
And their own domain name registrars.
And their own payment processors.
> We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc).
> They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them.
Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them?
Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".
What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out.
Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030.
The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is slippery-slope nonsense, just where this conversation always ends up. You can "what if..." you're way to us banning these individuals from driving cars if you want, but it's not what's being discussed.
I am very, very, very in favor of reddit disallowing hate speech on their community as that is an active behavior on the site itself for a community they own. I am very, very, very against any organization barring access to things like domain name registration, hosting, etc. on the basis of their expressed ideas up to the point of them directly enabling clearly criminal behavior (e.g., directly organizing violent attacks, sharing revenge porn, etc.).
Private citizens kicking someone out of a restaurant for being rude is not the same thing as government actors barring them from ever owning a restaurant, or going somewhere else where their rudeness is welcome.
> The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is a false dichotomy built on the aforementioned slippery slope fallacy.
You can't claim slippery slope if it already happened. Payment processors, domain name registrars, hosting providers, and anti-DDoS services already ban people they dislike. If we slide any further down this slope, the deplatformed will have to lay their own optic fibre.
Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
Technically you could probably bring it down if you simulate a massive amount of users who only access spam sites but that would probably become rather expensive because you would attack your own nodes and your own nodes would try to help the network. It would also need to persist forever else everything would simply go back to normal shortly after the attack is stooped.
The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
Platforms aren't public venues, they're private businesses offering access to a service under terms that serve their interests and business needs first and foremost... terms that everyone agreed to before being able to use the platform.
>The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
The law also allows for private ownership of businesses, contracts and freedom of association. The law says Google's platform is Google's property and Google can do whatever it darn well likes with it.
>You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.
Who gets to define what spam is? Free expression isn't free if someone has the ability to define any arbitrary speech they don't like as "spam" and censor it. All of the slippery slope arguments applied to censorship of any other form of speech also apply to spam.
You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
That's a somewhat bold claim. At minimum, CAN-SPAM makes the worst of it illegal.
> [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007...
Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
Counties can imprison or kill you for speaking incorrectly.
Companies? Only have the power to cause me trouble when they are oligopolies, e.g. big tech right now. It can be quite severe trouble, even if it isn’t literal imprisonment.
A house? I am aware that poverty (and being a minor) forces some people to live with abusive persons who can give them a choice of silence or homelessness. That kind of evil doesn’t scale up to affect everyone (perhaps if it did we might try harder to fix it?)
If they deleted the apps already installed on your phone, then I'd agree.
4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform.
You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.
As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches.
I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
The average person puts their pitch fork back down and enjoys the bonding experience that a successful hunt brings to the community. The out-group isn't just persecuted because they are different, the whole process also helps confirm the unity of the in-group.
Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.
I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point.
That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of.
I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage.
As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from.
This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
Pretty much all the subs like the the_donald, republicans, conservative, asktrumpsupporters that are against the big tech censorship will censor (ban) you for just showing their hypocrisy.
I clicked on few links or r/RedditAlternatives, and they look like Facebook pages of rural Ohio.
This is like saying:
> Pretty much all the discussion groups that are against government censorship will censor you (throw you out) just for showing their hypocrisy.
It's not hypocritical to moderate one forum, on a platform where everyone can create his own forum, while also demanding that the platform itself doesn't censor discussions, anymore then it's hypocritical to moderate a discussion group, while also demanding that the government doesn't censor your discussions.
Moderation happens at the lowest level possible. Any content removal at a higher level is censorship.
I was banned from my (very liberal) U.S. state's subreddit for quoting Martin Luther King. I quoted a passage from one his speeches that denounced political violence, such as the arson and vandalism we've seen in Kenosha recently. The subreddit moderator banned me within minutes, called me a Nazi, and immediately denied the appeal.
I remember there were a bunch of posts in /r/zerowaste about someone explicitly advocating to be made a mod so that they can moderate the subreddit as an anti-capitalist. I really had to credit that person for the bravado of saying: "I'll ban people I disagree with, voooote for meeeeee".
In fact, the ONLY political subreddit I'm aware of that does not engage in this behavior is r/Libertarian. Credit to them for putting their money where their mouth is.
To be fair the creator of the sub came back and fixed it.
Opening an opportunity for someone else to sell the same "my fictional private sector free speech assurances that I imagined were part of the constitution are being upheld here" story to build a community
We live in an age where people seem to think in very black and white terms and if your beliefs don't align you shouldn't have them or be able to voice them.
Aside from inciting violence, your beliefs are yours. If they aren't breaking the law, you do you. I don't have to agree with them or support them, essentially 'don't tread on me'.
But people need to remember when you deplatform these racist, ugly thoughts and words, you push those people together, galvanizing them and their beliefs. As others in this thread have stated, I believe that's why voat got so bad so quickly.
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I don't know what the end all solution is here, but I know I deal with racism on an almost daily basis in real life, and I'm Hispanic, so I can't imagine how bad it must be for some others. Pretending it doesn't exist won't fix it. Pushing it to the furthest corners of the internet won't make it go away in real life.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...