First off, that's not an axiomatic fact, that's the definition of an empirical question. Secondly, even if it was true, who cares? You can't enlighten every crazy person on the planet, it's a waste of time. The goal of effective policy is to isolate radical elements to a point where they can't target mainstream communities of people who hold malleable beliefs. That is effective prevention.

I also see absolutely no evidence that the thesis of further radicalisation is even true. Here in Germany we have taken fairly strong, preventative measures to tackle hate speech and conspiracies online. It seems to have mostly worked, we have I think, one of the least polarized populations right now, broadly speaking. Insofar as there are fringe elements in their dedicated spaces, because they are in dedicated spaces, they can be monitored.

edit: another important point I forgot to mention, a lot of radical activity today uses commercial platforms for revenue to further fund their cause, maybe nowhere as evident as in the US where that sort of political activity seems to be a legitimate business. Depriving extremists of those revenue streams alone probably does significant damage to their cause.

This is flat-earth conspiracy theory level falsehood. And it’s a falsehood about an extremely politically and socially important issue that if widely accepted could have massive repercussions. Is YouTube going to censor it?

If it’s been proven false, don’t say it. If it can’t be proven false, carry on, as that’s not against the terms and conditions.

Or, a false equivalency between saying the election was stolen, and saying the world will end in 12 years if we don’t do something.

And those items in the past have been heavily investigated, brought to the courts, and due to no evidence, summarily rebuked.

Apples and oranges.

Don’t get me wrong, the world ending in 12 years is a silly thing to say.

Yes, but not all of them are equally dangerous, so there actually is no reason to assume they ought to be evenly treated. There are ideologies that lead to people shooting up a restaurant or behead non-believers in the streets, and then there are people who are just annoyingly woke, or to take that example from the comment below, are overly cautious about climate change.

There's a difference between something that is merely non-scientific or silly and something that gets people killed or threatens democratic society or peaceful transition of power. That false equivalence seems prominent in US discourse when it comes to identifying and dealing with radicalism. The numbers of domestic terrorism in the US by political orientation actually make that very clear as well.

Only when those speeches are formulated in German.

So what did you ban them in the first time?

> The goal of effective policy is to isolate radical elements to a point where they can't target mainstream communities of people who hold malleable beliefs. That is effective prevention.

Let's say I think Google is a threat to individual rights. Are their on their right to prevent people with "malleable beliefs"(how condescending) to listen to that message? Is that what you want? A corporate-controlled Internet and society? If you think they are free to go elsewhere you must know that the natural direction in unfettered capitalism is that the winners accumulate more and more in bigger conglomerates. That is an extremely dangerous game, courting a fascist society, in the original meaning of the term.

1. Someone who is radicalized digging deeper

2. Someone who is radicalized changing their mind

3. Someone who is not radicalized getting radicalized

#1 is bound to happen, #2 has no chance of happening, so at this point, preventing #3 is the way to go. Keeping these already radicalized people on Youtube achieves nothing. On the other hand, keeping them on Youtube gives these them a huge platform to spread misinformation. Newsmax nad OANN don't have anywhere near the reach Youtube does, especially outside the existing bubble.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=red...

A point so simple it feels silly to point it out, but here we are.

The rate of spread is a problem of YouTube's own devising based on clicks, views and likes. Remove this gamification and you'll see less engagement, hence less scale of radicalization.

With youtube labeling people "radicals" is a deliberate polarising term designed to do little more than tar and feather people into a specific box. Just like segregation, just like Protestants, just like the German Jews... Etc. It's very unflattering.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/newsmax/

"Overall, we rate Newsmax Right Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as well as numerous failed fact checks. (M. Huitsing 10/8/2017) Updated (11/12/2020)"

The real danger is that, one day, your own ideas are the ones considered too radical.

True. Worse, the acceptable range of opinions within both the US right and the US left have narrowed.

These movements did not materialise out of a vacuum. Their growth and replenishment of strength is largely contingent on permissive mainstream platforms on which to set up shop.

I think platforms like Youtube and Facebook have shown the dangers of democratised mass-broadcasting. There were dreams at the dawn of the internet that enhanced access to information would create a better informed citizenry, but rather it has just exacerbated our worst traits as a society.

I don't know what the solution is really. The current situation is untenable in America, but how does one unpick it without resorting to totalitarianism? I'm somewhat partial to ending anonymity on social media posts, so at least people must stand publicly by their positions and can't create sock puppets to inflate their message.

How would a “true” web-of-trust be superior?

I want people to be free to criticize that without being worried about being targeted by the government or it's supporters.

It is extremely important that people are free to criticize the government, while being as immune as possible to retaliation for that criticism.

The government has a documented history of retaliating against people regarding speech issues.

There was a long period, know as "the red scare" in which this happened.

There are many forms of "in between" retaliation, that is in between a democracy and an authoritarian government.

And it is important to also protect people against these in between consequences, by allowing them to be anonymous.

We don't have to straw man the situation, and talk about a dictatorship that kills people.

Instead, we can also say that lesser forms of retaliation are also bad, such as the kind that happened during the red scare.

Joe McCarthy was censured by congress and fell out of political favour. Furthermore, the Supreme Court handed down a number of decisions that greatly reduced the scope of the government's ability to penalise supporters of communism such as: Yates v. United States, Scales v. United States, and United States v. Robel. This is how such matters should be tackled in a free society, rather than coming up with elaborate mechanisms to hide our views from the government.

Ok, and regardless of that, anonymity still helps people avoid consequences for their speech. Which is a good thing, given that the government has in the past done things like that.

> This is how such matters should be tackled in a free society

Well that is cold comfort to the people who suffered real harm, during the red scare. While other people were trying to solve that problem "the right way", lots of people still suffered harm in the mean time.

Things don't always get solves immediately. Sometimes, problems just exist. And regardless if things have been solved "the right way" or not, other solutions, such as anonymity still help.

None of this stuff is exclusive. Feel free to try and stop government consequences some other way. But regardless of that, anonymity still helps some people avoid some consequences for their speech, which is good.

> elaborate mechanisms

None of this is elaborate. Lots of people have pretty effective ability to post speech anonymously.

Instead, it would be you who would have to engage in large elaborate schemes to prevent people from being anonymous.

The default, easy, non-elaborate solution is what we have now. Which is that there are many platforms where anonymity is easy for most people, most of the time. And that the government would have to take pretty extreme actions to remove that from people, like court orders that don't happen very much right now for most people.

Perhaps, but there is now firm legal precedent that greatly limits their ability to do it again.

> None of this stuff is exclusive. Feel free to try and stop government consequences some other way. But regardless of that, anonymity still helps some people avoid some consequences for their speech, which is good.

Some people should not be able to avoid the consequences of their speech. For instance, people that harass, slander, and threaten others online. Additionally, people that use their speech to obtain money under false pretenses shouldn't be able to hide behind a veil of anonymity. Police officers that enforce the law by day and joke about how much they hate black people and jews while squirreled away behind their keyboard at night should have to own their opinions in the public square.

> Lots of people have pretty effective ability to post speech anonymously.

It's possible with enough tech savviness, but tactics like VPNs are more frail than most people believe.

There are also the situations of highly targeted minorities that would now be unable to protect themselves, because you've made anonymity illegal. These people really do need anonymity to protect themselves.

And no amount of laws can protect someone from a hate mob attacking them, that doesn't care about the consequences. One of the only ways for many of these people to protect themselves, is to be anonymous.

> Some people should not be able to avoid the consequences of their speech.

I have given pretty good examples where people absolutely should be given immunity from consequences. Specifically people should be immune from consequences if they are engaging in government criticism.

The examples that I gave are great reasons as for why anonymity is important for people.

> It's possible with enough tech savviness

Actually, it is possible with basically no amount of tech savviness. All you have to do is click the create new account button, on twitter, and you have just been given a pretty large amount of anonymity.

In order to have your twitter account de-anonymized, the government has to take pretty extreme actions, such as court orders.

Even if a certain anonymous situation is not 100% foolproof, it is still important that it is available, as it can help most people, most of the time.

It turns out, that simply being able to create an anonymous twitter account, is pretty anonymous, most of the time, for most people.

Also, the original point that I was countering was this "pseudo-anonymous political discourse on open mainstream mass-broadcast social media".

So I am talking about specifically why anonymity, in the form of having the ability to do what people do now, which is create anonymous twitter accounts, and engage in political discourse.

To reiterate, I was specifically talking about circumstances where people broadcast to mass audiences. If people of a certain minority want to congregate together in a private space to discuss things important to them as though they would in their own house, then they should have every right to do so in private.

> And no amount of laws can protect someone from a hate mob attacking them, that doesn't care about the consequences. One of the only ways for many of these people to protect themselves, is to be anonymous.

I don't know what world you live in, but I haven't seen a hate mob running down my street for a while.

> Actually, it is possible with basically no amount of tech savviness. All you have to do is click the create new account button, on twitter, and you have just been given a pretty large amount of anonymity.

> In order to have your twitter account de-anonymized, the government has to take pretty extreme actions, such as court orders

That won't offer you much protection at all from the government. So you seem to have a lot of trust in warrants being issued justly, but also a great fear that the government will turn against you.

It's not that hard to get a court order if the government has probable cause that you've committed a crime. There have been 55,000 warrants for US Facebook accounts since the start of 2020. This is not including national security requests, which Facebook is not legally allowed to disclose.

https://transparency.facebook.com/government-data-requests/c...

> Also, the original point that I was countering was this "pseudo-anonymous political discourse on open mainstream mass-broadcast social media".

> So I am talking about specifically why anonymity, in the form of having the ability to do what people do now, which is create anonymous twitter accounts, and engage in political discourse.

I'm glad we're back on the same page, so would you say that the culture of anonymous political discourse on social media has resulted a constructive political discourse? Is there nothing you'd change about it?

Ok, and I think that it is important that highly targeted minorities are free to broadcast to mass audiences, without having to worry about being targeted or harrassed. Anyone who is fighting for civil rights, could become the target of mass hate and harassment, for both themselves and their friends and family, if the hate mob decides to target them.

If these groups did not have these protections, then it would only be the privileged, who would be able to express themselves to a wide audience. Other people, who are more frequently targeted, would no long have a voice.

> they should have every right to do so in private.

They should have the right to do that in public, as well, to a mass audience, while also being able to take actions to protect themselves from harassment, by being anonymous.

> but I haven't seen a hate mob running down my street for a while.

Women and minorities face a lot of harassment. It is not about a "physical" mob. There are more ways that mobs can target and harass people, than just some mob on the street engaging in physical violence.

I am not sure what to tell you, if you are not aware of all the threats and harassment that these people can get, from randos.

> So you seem to have a lot of trust in warrants being issued justly

Being forced to issue a warrant is another protection. That is much better, than if some random government official, just has access to that information, and can retaliate against you, without anyone being able to find out about it.

> also a great fear that the government will turn against you.

It is not just about some totalitarian regime. Instead it is about the in between stuff. Things like a no name burocrat, having your information, and using their power to target you, without there being a easy way for them to get caught.

Warrets and paper trails make it more difficult for government officials to abuse the information that they would otherwise have access to, if it was all available without a warrent.

> Is there nothing you'd change about it?

Yes, I would provide more ways for people to be even more anonymous, and provide stronger methods for people to protect themselves from retaliation, whether that be by random government employees, or random people on the internet.

Joe McCarthy wasn't the terrible person he is made out to be. Information discovered later, long after his censure, proves that he was correct in many of the cases where he was thought wrong.

Today's lies and censorship will become the supposed "facts" that are taught to future generations. All sorts of falsehoods will be used to created graded test questions.

Instead, we have the possibility of the recommendation engine recommending videos en-mass.

Beside, plenty of far-right reactionaries are entirely unafraid of attaching their names to their beliefs. Just look at the stuff people say on Facebook. And consider that you don't need to publish your name in order to listen to a far-right ideologue -- only to be one. And it doesn't take many ideologues to reach a large audience.

I don't know that there is a solution, outside of "encourage platforms to effectively deplatform bad actors." This has been successful in the past in dealing with movements which recruit heavily through social media, like ISIS — the difference is that social media companies have feared partisan backlash from conservatives if they apply these strategies against the far right.

This risks suppressing free speech, but I think this entire issue is a result of us wanting to treat social media companies as perfectly neutral universal forums. The notion of unbiased platforms needs to be abandoned, and social media monoliths need to be split into distributed, federated platforms, like email or Mastodon. This way, platforms can moderate to their heart's content: excessive moderation of any particular instance is less of an issue because users can always move to a different, better instance, but people who were justly banned will be isolated from the general public in their own servers.

This model will have challenges, foreseen and unforeseen, but it's got to be better than the current media oligopoly. At the very least, it's progress.

> make spokespeople and activists extremely vulnerable

As you've demonstrated, anonymity is an imperfect system of protecting such spokespeople, so they should have greater legal protections. Reducing the spectrum of internet anonymity would actually support this goal as it'd simplify applying existing legal protections such as restraining orders within the internet domain.

> Beside, plenty of far-right reactionaries are entirely unafraid of attaching their names to their beliefs. Just look at the stuff people say on Facebook.

Perhaps, but that far right ideology must receive social promotion through 'likes', 'shares', and other such mechanisms in order to spread their message. Why is it necessary for these acts to be anonymous?

I sincerely don't understand how further decentralisation or federation could help resolve the problem. It just seems to me like you'd be making the moderation problem harder as you'd be shifting the burden from a few large companies to many small companies.

Meanwhile, the people who are actually threatened by this are the people reactionaries are victimizing — closeted gay and trans people, for instance. They lose their ability to find supporting communities online because as soon as they engage with a forum like that, such as for instance a relevant subreddit, their participation is broadcasted to everyone they know in real life. It's easy to say "they should have greater legal protection," but they already have legal protection. It's already illegal to murder trans people for being trans, but trans people are nonetheless subject to a massive number of hate crimes. Isolating these people and making it impossible for them to reach out when they're in abusive home life situations is a terrible policy.

And this is just one example of a group for whom the loss of online anonymity would be hugely damaging. You've massively underestimated the harm which being de-anonymized online can cause (that's why "doxxing" someone, or releasing their personal details online, is such a serious threat to their safety).

Does anyone know of any good research on the early days of radio? I have a suspicion we had a similar problem before regulation due to the overcrowded airwaves.

If you know of any good books that cover this era let me know please.

> Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit, but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.

Oh everyone understands it, but there's a trade-off you're not acknowledging:

1. Letting these people stay on twitter, YouTube, or reddit gives them an audience to recruit. The people in these toxic groups then may be less radical on average, but there will be more of them overall.

There also will still be highly radicalized members, and the sympathy of the less radical gives them support that could allow them to do more damage.

2. Quarantining them to Gab or Parler or whatever denies them the recruiting opportunities. The dead-enders who migrate will become more radicalized, but their numbers will be smaller, and perhaps decline over time, due the the lack of new blood.

Even if the plan is to marginalise Republicans by selectively suppressing their views on YouTube, it seems questionable if that will provoke the same response as banning "fatpeoplehate" and "coontown" from Reddit. Tensions are likely to increase.

I had in mind white supremacists, QAnon, Boogaloo Bois, etc. I don't think the people making false and baseless claims about the election being stolen from Trump can easily be dealt with this way, because too many high-status people have joined that bandwagon.

The youtube ban impacts the most wingnuttiest parts of the internet directly.

In other words, no, what you claim doesn't seem axiomatic at all.

Do you have any quantitative analysis to cite for this or is it just your feeling?

Alienation. Yes, this will create some self-feeding echo chamber elsewhere far away and out of sight. I am fine with that. The only people bothered by that are thought police who cry that somebody online might have a disgusting opinion.

In my view, 'zealotry' crosses over to 'radicalism' when the threshold of violence is crossed. We generally are concerned about radicals in religion or politics because we fear they will or have committed violence in the name of their cause.

Yet... there are far (far) more instances of violence on the record against Americans who support Trump than by them. Up to and including murder. In fact, there is so much political violence against them that congress created a list of violent political acts and entered the list into the congressional record[0].

Who is committing this violence and why?

Here is about 10 minutes of research:

- One of the murders, Lee Keltner, a hatter in Colorado:

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/17/lee-keltner-protest-sh...

- In this assault, the first is mild. The student punched in the face could have had knocked teeth out:

https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/rising-political-tension

- Punched in the face for wearing a hat in Russian. The assailant couldn't read it, but attacked once the wearer told him the translation:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-beaten-up-in-california-re...

- [0] And here is that seven pages of a Political Violence Report, official congressional record:

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20190409/109266/HHRG...

- The other murder:

https://katu.com/news/local/patriot-prayer-founder-man-shot-...

- Here are three more assaults, including an 81 year-old man:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/02/28/maga-hat-wearing-vic...

- This was a serious beating, an art gallery owner:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-city-gallery-owner-attacked-w...

- Citing the Berkeley assault, this guy wrote and app to help conservatives find safe places to dine out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/11/need-safe...

- This is attempted murder:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-arrested-allegedly-driving-van...

Regarding the 7 page listing of more than 200 various acts of political violence, including attempted murder, against conservative politicians; I searched for the same document produced during the Obama administration and could not find one. From that I infer that during his administration, neither conservative nor liberal politicians saw political violence as enough of a concern to list it and enter into the permanent record of the United States Congress.

Political and religious violence and oppression was one of the primary motivators for the United States to seek independence from England. We are going backwards.

The idea that gatekeepers need to withhold information from people so they believe the correct things is insane and has no limiting principle. We’ve already tumbled well down the slippery slope. Just a couple of years ago, the censorship was just going to be about “flat earth”-type stuff. Now we’re censoring stuff that’s still the subject of active litigation. They’re probably correct about it, but the first application of a terrible idea is usually workable. The Ministry of Truth probably started out to keep misinformation from spreading about vaccination, or something innocuous like that.

Is litigation supposed to be a indicator of legitimacy or something? Anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason. In addition, most (all?) of the lawusits being dismissed without trial, which suggests they were rubbish to begin with.

No, it's a ban on baseless claims of massive electoral fraud. Coverage of the President is still allowed.

I have absolutely no idea why you reference Obama in this.

Yes, there's still active litigation. But there is yet to be any notable evidence of anything approaching serious, let alone widespread, wholesale electoral fraud.

Well, yes, we're talking about the President of the United States spreading FUD on a national election, just because he lost. That's how much America has fallen.

> further destruction of trust in elites, fracturing the media ecosystem, and opportunistic competitors arising

All of this has already happened - keeping Trump and his supporters in "mainstream sites" did nothing to restore trust in elites, or mend the rift in media, so I'm not sure why it would suddenly work now that he's finally being shown the door.

The media and elites just spent four years burning their credibility in an incinerator. (Which I think is a tremendously bad thing for America.) Imagine if, instead of spinning out a yarn about Trump being a Russian asset for two years and having to massively walk it back, they had kept their powder dry and responsibly reported on the bad things actually contained in the Mueller report. Do you think that maybe folks would be less willing to believe the outrageous things Trump is saying now?

The analogy of Reddit banning toxic subs only holds if everyone is ACTUALLY on reddit, most simply left. There is already talk among conservatives of alternative Reddits and Facebooks, alternatives Netflix/Hollywood companies, alternative Fox News even. Many will say "but those will be subject to the same problems of early Twitter and Reddit, how to excise the toxic elements and keep the real discussion." I would say that can EASILY be done without going down the censorship rabbit hole by simply knowing where to stop. Get rid of the illegal stuff, the spam and pornography, and leave the rest regardless of how distasteful it is. Its an Overton Window problem, you just need slightly looser boundary condition on discourse. Stop pretending to be platforms and admit you are indeed publishers to an extent. Give users the ability to filter what they don't want to see and pledge to never bias your algorithms. The cries of the left will be largely irrelevant, they will simply tell you to "go back to Twitter if you don't like it". Once the public loses faith and trust in your company or institution due to your sacrifices in credibility in the name of censorship of one sides information, there wont be any coming back from that loss of face. I'm not saying this is a good or healthy thing for public discourse, but I do think it will come to pass.

In the past, they said they were censored and there was a conspiracy against them, and we could all say, no there isn't, you are active on major online platforms and nobody is suppressing you. Now we can't say that anymore. Not only has the suppression they falsely alleged actually started to happen, companies are even proud to publicly announce that they are part of it.

This is a total backfire because it makes it even harder to change people's minds by confirming what conspiracy theorists suspected all along. Online platforms have fallen into the trap of making one of the main assertions of online far right nonsense actually become true. It is a massive own goal.

The question shouldn't be "will doing x help the antagonists", it's "will doing x result in a worse outcome for the antagonists". If they gain from either choice, we shouldn't be paralyzed in our response.

I’m married to someone who is caught up in this right-wing cult (it is a cult) and every time a video is removed, it simply convinces her even more that it’s true. If it wasn’t true, why would they hide it? Why do they not want you to see it? BECAUSE IT MUST BE TRUE.

This is just the information equivalent of Ruby Ridge - a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory.

No, they didn't

----

> They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent."

This only holds for the creative (and frankly, dishonest) definition of hate speech that the study[0] used.

> First, we automatically extract terms which are unique to the two subreddits that were banned due to hate speech and harassment. The resulting term list includes a number of words that indicate hate speech, as well as some other terms that appear to be specific to the Reddit context. We then qualitatively filter these lists, obtaining a high precision hate lexicon. These lexicons are publicly available to the community as a resource.

Not only did they start from a corpus of _words unique to the banned subreddits_, they "qualitatively" filtered it down, with no description of the procedure used. Anyone who's spent any time on smaller subs knows that they, like any online community, develop their own lexicons, up to and including jargon[1]. Everyone who's ever gawked at hate subs like /r/coontown or /r/shitredditsays know that this tendency is on overdrive. A reduction in the vocabulary _unique_ to the banned subreddit means that a ban refugee from /r/fatpeoplehate could be just as active on /r/HamplanetHateMail (a non-banned sub mentioned in the study) but would be counted as vastly reducing her hate speech, as long as she switched from /r/fatpeoplehate's "landwhale" to /r/hamplanethatemail's preferred "lard-ass" (I made these examples up, as I've had little exposure to the fat-activist/fat-hate corners of the Internet in particular).

What this study actually shows is: "usernames from banned subreddits don't go to other subreddit's and communicate with the same username in the banned subreddit's hyper-specific jargon". Which is to say, "when a community is broken up and dispersed among other communities, the _specific_ inside jargon of the community is a lot less common, with no reference to whether the substance of the comments have changed".

I mean, duh.

This would perhaps be excusable in 2015 or something, but one should really know better by now than to uncritically cite popular coverage of sociology studies, particularly social-justice-aligned ones, without at least skimming the paper. Studies on hate speech are particular easy to check, given that (as this study puts it), "there is no universally accepted definition of the phrase"; at a minimum, seeing what they actually define as hate speech is core to understanding the findings. In this case, the authors start with a standard definition from the European Court of Human Rights and torture out a metric that's convoluted, qualitative (in their own words!), and full of holes that the authors don't even pretend not to fill with their own biases. (Seriously, I recommend reading Section 2.2)

[0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf [1] Some examples: "rentoid" or "renthog" on /r/loveforlandlords, "monkee" on /r/PoliticalCompassMemes, and famously, "shitlord" on /r/shitredditsays back in the day)

Your analogy only really works if you ban half the population from the US. Sure if you banned democrats or republicans from the country, then you could reduce tensions. But if you censor one side and keep them around, it'll only inflame tensions.

> I think YouTube made the right calculation that this will in fact _reduce_ tension and slow the momentum of this destabilizing movement.

Does it seem to you that tensions are reducing? If youtube did this after the 2016 election, do you think it would have reduced tensions?

You mentioned reddit. Do you remember what voat became when reddit closed down subs? That hate didn't go away it just moved and concentrated itself.

I think we need to look at that carefully - especially, how much of youtube hate is well-considered, articulated positions and how much is people just "swept into the propaganda." That's a complicated question but think the medium of video tends to be worst form for well-considered opinions and the form most likely to just be a carrier of irrational-emotional/progandistic messages. It's real time stream of imagines/words quality makes it hard to consider the logic of an argument and easier to get swept up in the emotions of a claim as well as easier to think that, say, an image of a scientist gives legitimacy to a claim,etc. I think this quality was demonstrated back in the days of TV as mass medium.

This isn't about removing hate, this is about making sure it's not promoted at scale.

It's epidemiology for ideas.

Memes require connectivity to replicate.

No one is blocking opinions. Trump has failed to prove election fraud in over 50 cases so far, and the safe harbor deadline has now past, which is why Youtube has now put this rule in place. It is now confirmed that Biden has won the election, and anyone claiming otherwise is intentionally lying. If they had proof, they would've shown it in court, where there are real consequences, not on social media where anything goes.

This is a great example of why censorship is such a disaster.

The Texas case was dismissed today because Texas "has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections". So regardless of whether there was anything to complain about, Texas isn't allowed to complain about it. (This is basically what everybody predicted, but it means the Supreme Court will never even hear the case.)

The case in Pennsylvania was dismissed because they were complaining that Pennsylvania had changed its election procedures in violation of its own constitution (in ways alleged to facilitate fraud), which appears to be true, but the court dismissed the case for a procedural reason again, in this case for being brought too late.

Several other cases were dismissed for similar reasons, i.e. lack of standing or timing. The only one I'm aware of where they're even being allowed to make their case is the one in Wisconsin, which is still pending.

Does it concern you at all that you apparently didn't know that?

First off, the reason why so many of these lawsuits are dismissed for procedural mistakes is because they are taken by awful lawyers, since real election lawyers don't want to touch these with a 10 foot pole.

Secondly, again, while they claim fraud on social media and on TV, the lawyers actually don't claim fraud in court, as that's much harder to prove, and affidavits are just hearsay when it comes to proving fraud. The reality is that so far, across 50+ lawsuits, they haven't managed to show any real proof of anything.

You explained the two SC ones but still fail to explain how the other 50 or more failed, or why none of them have been able to present any real evidence. Why is it that they all have lack of standing? Because you can't overturn an entire election based on an affidavit of someone claiming they saw trucks full of ballots, with zero other evidence. And rightly so.

As for the Texas case, what a coincidence that such a baseless suit happen to have been brought by the Texas AG, who is coincidentally under investigation by the FBI, and is seeking a pardon from the President.

I'm honestly curious what YOU think the reason is. Is it just pure bad luck that all 50+ lawsuits just failed in the most miserable way? Is the court system broken? If they have real solid evidence (and no, someone signing an affidavit is not it), then where is it? Why have we not seen any yet?

But go ahead and assume it's because of censorship if it makes you happy.

EDIT: I'd also add that many of these cases are dismissed early because, even the defense can show that even if everything the plaintiff claims is true, it still isn't enough. In most of these cases, Trump's team is trying to use irregularity with a 1-2 ballots to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots, and that's just not how it works. That's why all those lawsuits are being dismissed without even being heard because even if they prove their point, they cannot overturn the election.

It seems odd then that you're asking them to present evidence in court when that is what they've been trying to do and haven't been able to as yet.

> First off, the reason why so many of these lawsuits are dismissed for procedural mistakes is because they are taken by awful lawyers, since real election lawyers don't want to touch these with a 10 foot pole.

Their lawyers claim their families have been threatened. I would believe that it could be hard to retain effective counsel in that environment.

Mistakes are also somewhat more likely than usual given the time constraints.

> Secondly, again, while they claim fraud on social media and on TV, the lawyers actually don't claim fraud in court

They weren't claiming fraud in the Pennsylvania case, because they had such a strong argument that the state had violated their own constitution. They were claiming fraud in some of the other cases.

> as that's much harder to prove, and affidavits are just hearsay when it comes to proving fraud.

Hearsay means claiming you heard someone else say something. Affidavits can contain hearsay but that doesn't automatically mean that everything in an affidavit is hearsay.

Also, there are hearsay exceptions, like statements against the interest of the speaker. If someone is admitting to backdating ballots or telling others to do it, which I expect is illegal, it's not immediately obvious why that wouldn't qualify.

> You explained the two SC ones but still fail to explain how the other 50 or more failed, or why none of them have been able to present any real evidence. Why is it that they all have lack of standing?

Most of the others weren't actually filed by the campaign. Which is one reason they may lack standing.

> Because you can't overturn an entire election based on an affidavit of someone claiming they saw trucks full of ballots, with zero other evidence.

But that's the thing. If you believed them (it was more than one person claiming to see that), you could. Maybe you don't, without more, but that's why there should be a court case. Where you then do discovery and subpoena the others who were there to see what they have to say about it etc. They got shut down before they had a chance to do that.

> I'm honestly curious what YOU think the reason is. Is it just pure bad luck that all 50+ lawsuits just failed in the most miserable way? Is the court system broken?

My impression is that the courts don't want to be involved in the controversy and are willing to take any excuse to get the case out of their courtroom. Can you even imagine what would happen if they actually proved their case?

> In most of these cases, Trump's team is trying to use irregularity with a 1-2 ballots to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots, and that's just not how it works. That's why all those lawsuits are being dismissed without even being heard because even if they prove their point, they cannot overturn the election.

The argument there is that they have statistical evidence of fraud. Which is weak, because the election was so weird with coronavirus and mail-in ballots that you would practically expect statistical anomalies. But if the fraud the statistics say is there, is there, then you should be seeing duplicate ballots and the like. And so then they present evidence of duplicate ballots and the like, to bolster the case that the statistical evidence of fraud is actually fraud.

And there is also another issue with all of this. A lot of these cases are separately claiming that there were 10,000 ballots here, 4000 there, 6000 somewhere else. Well, they were dismissed, because none of those are enough to change the outcome... unless you add some of them together. Which is why it seems wrong to dismiss a case for not affecting enough ballots on its own, before you know the outcome for any of the others. But that seems to be what happened.

> If they have real solid evidence (and no, someone signing an affidavit is not it), then where is it? Why have we not seen any yet?

I don't know what they have. The media coverage of all of this has been nakedly partisan propaganda from both sides. I was kind of hoping they'd make it into court somewhere so I could actually see them present their case, and see the other side defend against it, instead of just having all these depositions and affidavits that only present one side of the story and which I don't actually have time to read because they're a zillion pages long.

I agree with others about radicalization and slowing the spread of misinformation but it's a fine line to walk and throwing around reddits bullshit like it will work for real life scenarios isnt going to help anything.

Deplatforming legitimizes and empowers fringe groups and that's not something we need to be doing.

As for your rants about trump etc I agree they just had no basis in my and parents arguments.

So no, they were not banned for "sweeping opinions you don't agree with" either.

Source?

Separating the effectiveness of bans from these trendy moments is difficult. Applying a ban on political discussions around 2015-2016 would have likely maintained toxicity.

Let's just be careful about comparing strategies used to target niche internet hate groups with tens of millions of Trump supporters.

Conspiracy theories like Sharpiegate, hacked Dominion voting machines and Georgia election workers counting suitcases full of illegal ballots have been debunked. Trump's legal team has filed over 50 lawsuits to date, none of which have exposed any evidence of fraud or criminal conspiracy. The legitimate questioning is being done and the answer is, to an ever increasing degree of certainty, that Biden has won, and won legitimately.

QAnon nuts claiming the election is a coup de tat by Red China or a satanic cabal of Democratic pedophiles are not engaged in honest, good faith attempts at validating the integrity of the electoral process.

I'm not here to deny elections but I dont think much of it was including the machines going live on the net when Dominion said they didnt. They witnessed the packet traffic to international servers.

With regards to "debunking" on sites like Politifact you need to be careful. For instance they say the Smartmatic technology was not used in states that are being challenged when thats just not true. The tech is the same but runs under different banners and is all owned by Dominion. Also they focus on if Hugo Chavez family owns Smartmatic as the thing to debunk. Obviously thats not the case or the main convincing argument that is even being made. Its that the technology was used to game elections in Venezuela and that adopted tech is used in elections around the world now (why else would it be acquired unless they wanted the tech). There are no code audits because Dominion claims IP protection. Does that mean election rigging is happening? Not necessarily. But people have every right to ask that question and you should ask it too no matter what side you're on.

citation needed

There you go.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-cou...

Partisan source? Maybe. But unfortunately the fact checkers have lost all credibility over the last few months by debunking things like, in the context of this article, hunter's laptop.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/11/30/georgia...

They got rid of things like the_donald but if you dare look at comments sections you see things like cheering the death of people who spoke out against masks or lockdowns.

They got rid of the right-leaning toxicity.

They specialize in, profit from, and are ok with left-leaning toxicity.

That is morally bad. But besides that, it can have the effect of hiding actual truths. The author then considers thought experiments of what would have happened to the Watergate affair and other proven true scandals if there wasn’t free speech.

Go on the front page of reddit and count how many posts from subs like /r/insanepoeplefacebook, /r/publicfreakout, /r/idiotsincars, /r/trashy, and the like there are, right now it's at 15/25. On most days I've done this is close to 20/25. Today there are 5 posts about the TX appeal not being heard by the SC which has pushed some of the usual garbage off the front page.

5 years ago there were none (or maybe one if you squint hard enough): https://web.archive.org/web/20151212085428/https://www.reddi...

Reddit has become a more mean-spirited place the more subs have been banned, and every time the increase in vitriol is used as an excuse to run the next set of bans. People cheer this on until they get banned and then act surprised it happened.