Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members?
Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?
Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.
From the evidence of outsourced moderation, they started being influenced by conspiracy theories and suffering from PTSD
There is a serious logical hazard in believing that any of this is asymmetrical.
Take the recent US election for example. Very effortless to claim fraud and stolen election; just a couple of tweets in fact. Debunking them rather more difficult. Then there are the more specific claims, such as:
- China and Venezuela worked together to do this - Voting machines flipped votes - There were vote dumps at midnight - Dead people voted for Biden
All very easy claims to make, all rather more difficult to debunk sufficiently. Then, when one is debunked, another one easily pops up. Don't get me wrong, I think it's well worth the effort and we should fight disinformation, but effort it does take.
Bookmark links and have your list of links publicly accessible.
But separating the combatants doesn't just stop the algorithmically-promoted unintelligible flame wars. It stops the debate entirely. You lose the ability to even encounter the other tribe or have any idea what their views or concerns are.
I don't think so. This pattern has been observed, and has been a problem, since well before the modern eyeballs-and-engagement-obsessed era of the internet, and before ads were even present on forums at all. What you're describing makes it worse, but even in its absence there is a certain vocal subset of humanity for whom dominating a discussion is its own reward. As a forum grows eventually you will attract one of these people, and from that point on the discourse of the forum will be determined by Survival Of The Loudest.
And on that topic, do we really need to debate Nazis? Like, are we so committed to the idea of moral relativism that we can’t draw some lines? Because frankly, I have zero interest in debating with anyone whether or not my family and I should be gassed to death.
Every time people forget, the outcome is some horrible event like genocide.
This was a little gem in that article, seemingly highly relevant now:
> However, Rawls qualifies this with the assertion that under extraordinary circumstances in which constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, tolerant society has a reasonable right of self-preservation against acts of intolerance that would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution, and this supersedes the principle of tolerance. This should be done, however, only to preserve equal liberty – i.e., the liberties of the intolerant should be limited only insofar as they demonstrably limit the liberties of others: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."
Two examples: what im going to call the "im not touching you" type of harassment -- that is posting things clearly designed to hurt and wouldn't make sense in context unless designed for harassment. The platonic example here is the image macro that's the trans flag with the words "Your parents will burry you with the name they gave you". Cuel to the extreme, but doesn't technically call for violence against the given person, or the protected group at large so twitter and facebook, etc happily leave it up (and people wanting to be assholes hyper optimized pretty quick; ive seen the macro posted by multiple people in multiple places).
Second being the idea of stochastic terrorism. Painting a group as an unchecked evil means you don't have to tell anyone specifically they should commit violence, but, it's hard to be surprised if they come to that conclusion. See the shootings in Charleston or Christchurch.
Don't forget about Cesar Sayoc's mail bomb campaign[1].
I think being scared of coming into contact with bad ideas (and tackling them) just stops people from understanding why they are bad ideas. E.g. if we create a cultural taboo long enough, I do believe people will stop caring if something is bad.
Just look at all the edgy teenagers who think Nazi stuff is funny -- because it's taboo and not talked about enough. Sure, teens will be teens.
But just enough people slip through the cracks and become radicalised in their little bubble, with nobody to deprogram them because of the taboo status. If everybody was still sharing the same space (i.e. popular platforms like reddit) then there's less polarization going on.
You can learn about these topics in scholarly environments taught by actual experts who can provide you with real analysis. Refusing to have conversations with klan members does not prevent me from understanding and analyzing racism in america. In fact, I'm going to get a much better understanding by speaking to historians than klan members, since klan members aren't exactly incentivized to provide a dispassionate analysis of their ideology.
People aren't scared of coming into contact with bad ideas. People are frustrated with having to come into contact with propagandizing bigots who want to murder them.
The main reason you think of your political opponents as nazis is because you haven't been interacting with them and talking to them.
"Nazi" as a label is pretty useless as there are dozens of beliefs that are associated with "Nazi" (normally used as a label for rejecting any of the core tenants of progressivism), most people called Nazis might agree with a watered down version of one of them and disagree with the rest (The amount of conflation going on is a bit ridiculous, someone who believes in using military power to acquire resources and someone who believes in a "traditional" gender roles and someone who thinks those with learning difficulties should be steralized and someone who thinks Jews have too much influence in media are all "Nazis" but will agree with eachother on nothing else).
Of course, because someone who voices one of the views will get ejected from their community and go to the community of rejects where other people who had a single "Nazi" belief are... they'll become radicalized and adopt some of the other "Nazi" views they would otherwise have opposed (though rarely all). :/
And in fact quite a few of your examples in fact are part of that ideology.
The biggest reason why holding one of these ideas makes it likely you'll hold the others are the effects oulined above (people being pushed into the wotch community). So, in essence, the modern censorship environment created the modern Nazi. :D
They were all pretty popular ideas though.
- Where else can I say “Kill yourself, you glowing n+gg+rf+gg+t landwhale k+ke” without being banned? Voat is the only place I know of where I can do that.
- The Holocaust is a lie. It didn’t happen, but it should have,
- Voat will go away but its deep disgust of jews will forever remain in my heart.
Slurs not censored in the actual posts, obviously. So, you’ll forgive me for thinking Voat is full of literal Nazis.
Edit, censored with plus signs because asterisks were italicizing the text.
EDIT: added a reference. Keep in mind for every anti-war journalist fired for standing up to the official lies there were easily 100 who kept their heads down. Im not scared of flat earth lies. I'm scared of Iraq war or even worse, World War I levels of deception.
* By being easily digestible and easy to state while the the refutation requires a long form explanation.
* By spreading faster and being repeated more often than the truth preying on our innate bias toward things we’ve heard before.
* By being tied to an unrelated political ideology or issue of intellectual or moral superiority.
* By gaslighting where the authority of truth tellers are undermined.
* As a form of the Streisand effect where any attempt to discredit or silence lie tellers is parlayed into more evidence for its truth.
* When the belief in the truth imparts a material, social, or image cost to the would-be believer.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
People need to become aware just how bad most social media content that reaches them is.
Are you under the impression that people weren't free to speak their minds "back then"? People did speak their minds, loudly and regularly. That didn't change the outcome.
What?
> Lies require censorship of truth to survive.
This is naive. People willfully believe lies if they support their worldview, even in the presence of truth.
No they don't. Lies spread faster than truth[1] and repetition legitimizes[2]. The marketplace of ideas is the just world fallacy for people who like to think a lot.
[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1114.8.full
[2] https://www.spring.org.uk/2010/12/the-illusion-of-truth.php
Really well said. I'll admit I lean on "wetware" in these convos too.
Free speech perhaps breaks down in net-centric reality. Social norms that worked in a 2D plane of existence are not guaranteed to continue working when physical space constraints start to break down -- when every human agent is networked to every other human agent, oh and also centers of massive compute resources (with operators who have their own agendas)
Even if we had unlimited bandwidth, it would be wasted in such a war of attrition.
Would having people pay for a user account in order to be able to post on a forum reduce the amount of hate speech and related?
Something Awful has charged $10 for account creation for as long as i can remember.
While I do think it has kept away most low-effort trolls, there have certainly been deeply toxic attitudes and arguments still happened. Doxxing, organized harassment, racism and similar nastiness have certainly been issues with some regularity in most of the subforums.
The only reason why it has been kept down is a relatively large team of admins and moderators, and they have been far from infallible, there has been tons of drama in that regard, including at least one mod who literally doxxed other forums users to white supremacists.
On the whole though, the discussions there are a lot more civilized than on sites like Reddit. I think the small entry fee is part of it, but also thanks to an active moderation team and the standard policy being to put people in timeout first, instead of insta-banning for any offence.
Obviously there are differing views on how well it actually works, leading to various spin-off forums, with different policies and philosophies.
It would necessarily be a less profitable site than the competition, but that might not be a problem as long as it wasn't venture-funded.
Here’s a thought experiment I’ve come up with to illustrate this: what happens tomorrow if we shut down all social media (to whatever level you define social media.)
This gets to the crux of the issue - the underlying reality of the speed of information broadcast/transmission and the social-informational structures that are constructed to absorb it.
Unfortunately, the forum moderation team became woke and started introducing rules ouutlawing types of speech they disagreed with. This ended up reinforcing a whole load of vicious cycles (conservatives self-censoring, conservatives being ejected, moderation drifting further left) and you ended up with a very nasty circle-jerk of endless posters trying to one-up eachother with the latest scandal about how Evil their enemies were. Surprisingly, it didn't just kill discussion of left vs right on social issues, it killed basically all discussion of non-culture war political topics as well, drowned out by the purity spiral circlejerk.
Damn, this is such a good metaphore, I had to think a lot about it.
For my browser [1] I wanted to introduce a fact gathering and linking system, and build it in a way that bias of authors (and publishers) can be guessed when they release a new article.
My theory is that Rationalism will never be anything that can exist, because it is the opposite of human nature (or say, the founding idea of our society).
The underlying issue is that emotions cause a lot of people to get irrational due to them not being able to differ a potentially dangerous situation with a potentially (equally) good one.
I think that most (if not all) of fake news websites were shared because of only a couple of reasons:
1) Humans like to get reinforced in their own perception more than they like to get disagreed with.
2) Articles in these type of publishing mediums appeal to emotions rather than to facts, hence the reason for why they use pictures, videos and other recordings as "evidence" even when they had totally nothing to do with it.
3) Humans are lazy. This is by far the most important point. If it is easy to comply with an emotional statement, and hard to gather evidence to disprove it; the emotional statement will always win.
4) Humans confuse disagreement with punishment. As a kid you get taught that there are negative effects when you disagree with society, or your mum/dad or other authoritarian figures. Rather than to punish kids when they are wrong we should encourage the gathering of evidence, and let them form an argument for both sides.
5) Humans are beings that forget. That is why media for the masses reuses pictures of a situation that happened years ago as "proof" for something clickbaity. Most people won't remember it if it was a situation that had a boring outcome, but they certainly will remember it when it had a negative emotional effect on themselves.
6) Depression is a huge hole where nobody without external support can come out, due to how our thinking nature works. Similar to 5) our brain is wired to remember negative punishments more than positive reinforcements, and that is why we tend to get depressive more likely than we tend to get optimistic...which in turn plays in the cards of fake news because the bad obvious enemy could do some serious bad thing to us.
But yeah, these are just my two cents. Due to my browser I thought a lot about this and came to the conclusion that irrational hate speech is worse an enemy than someone might think on first sight.
This insight helps me understand why I am so frustrated with political forums. Thank you.
But being an analytic, how can this be improved? And are some societies/countries/governments better at doing so? Is it easier in a more homogeneous society?
This would allow high quality moderation that lets communities focus on topics without as much worry about free-speech issues. Essentially allowing the classic, 'Go build your own social media' be actually possible since the communities that may not like your content are sufficiently small.
Say you're something anodyne, like /r/RomanHistory or something (I don't know if that's real). For obvious reasons, that is a topic that Western fascists really like; they're gonna come by, even if their "fascist hat" isn't on right that second. But that train's never late, that fascist hat goes on eventually. And the first fascist might be polite. So might his friends. And maybe you see a few off-color jokes that maybe you, as a slightly-but-not-heavily-invested mod, slap down--but those jokes are the way that they start to find each other. And meanwhile, as things grow? What often happens is that one of their more buttoned-up types ends up on your moderation team, because hey, they're Respected By The Community (and this happens in person, too, when it comes to groups and political entities; this is a very common foot-in-the-door tactic). And then it just grows from there. Maybe you've got the spine to "ruin everything" by kicking them out at this point, by cutting out the rot, but that's going to hurt and hmm, maybe it's best to just go along and get along, especially because any time you try to act against it, you've got those folks who pipe up about how Nazis should have freedom of speech too, even if you don't like their ideas...
...and now you have a fascist community.
"Strong moderation"--the bartender in that story telling the first fascist to get the hell out--is not something that can be even remotely taken for granted. You must insulate your systems against fascism because it is a hack of the system. The instinctual emotional attack it employs on a liberal order requires so much more work to stop than it does to continue that anywhere it can take root, it can strangle everything else. This is real, and this is what those coded "free speech ideals" are being weaponized to protect while it grows.
That's the same thing.
I have several friends who are professors of medieval history. For various reasons, fascists are really interested in medieval european history and like to attend conferences as "independent scholars". They pass out propaganda and harass scholars who have the gall to do things like discuss women in medieval europe or any form of cultural transmission between europe and the islamic world. The solution has been to rip this stuff out. You can't have "order" in the conference where people are able to share actual scholarly work while free of harassment without "slapping down the fascists".
I disagree. You can enforce behavioral restrictions without reducing it to us vs them. It is about order and maintaining good relations. In the case of people disrupting your conference, you can have them removed for their behavior without resorting to name calling and framing it like you're "fighting fascists". It's like policing. If you reduce it to "catching bad guys", you won't get good police.
Some racist asking questions at a panel about wild shit they read online is a waste of conference time. 20 racists asking questions at a panel about wild shit they read online ruins entire conferences. You need to nip that in the bud.
Occasionally they have useful idiots carving out their elbow room, but the heartening thing about 2020--maybe the only thing--is that there are ever fewer useful idiots, and instead rhetorical positions like this have to be taken up by folks who just don't hide their "power levels" the way they would need to for adequate opsec.
Wow. You are so off the mark I don't even know what to say. It's this kind of thinking that divides the world. It is paranoid us vs them garbage.
I read your posts.
They speak for themselves.
You are on the forum so long you figure out who is a repeat offender and who are the coordinates groups
The actual work is very similar, only varying in quantity.
On both groups, there are regulars, regulars with known triggers, casuals who might become regulars, and flamers. The regulars with specific triggers can be progressively discouraged.
The flamers must be stopped hard, or else they dominate conversation for days or weeks, making everyone else unhappy. You can give them a second chance, but not a third.
But you can put a lot of harm down to the excesses of capitalism too. We could eject anyone expressing sympathies for that Adam Smith fellow as well.
Or maybe this is rapidly getting out of hand.
No political system presents an argument for white supremacy that is legitimate and in good faith.
I hope this elaboration of the obvious is helpful.
That's a Soviet idea? It seems national health insurance was first conceived in Imperial Germany[0] (which the Weimar Republic, then the Nazis continued), then adopted in Britain, then Imperial Russia (which presumably the Soviets continued). Get your facts straight.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#History
Is it? Says who? The Soviets did a great many things. It doesn't mean all of them are "Soviet things". Nationalized healthcare predates the Soviets, still exists in nearly all capitalist countries in one form or another, and is viewed largely positively in each of those countries.
The Soviets had a powerful military and infamous police force. When you say "Soviet Russia" the average person will think "Red Army" and "KGB" before nationalized healthcare. Going by your logic are the military and police "socialist ideas"? They use government money to provide an equal level of service to all inhabitants of the nation - namely protecting and safeguarding them. Police and military obviously predate socialism/communism but the Soviets were renowned for them, so that makes them socialist ideas, right?
Comparing racism in Nazism - a core central tenet, and one that's actively harmful, to nationalized healthcare in communism - an incidental feature, mostly positive, and also found in nearly every capitalist country, is a strawman.
Where? In most of the Western countries that have it, it post-dates WWII, and corresponds to the replacement of capitalism in the relatively pure sense with the modern mixed economy, which is arguably more Marxist than the USSR and other “Communist” regimes based on Leninism and it's descendants.
Or, put another way, saying its rapidly getting out of hand because you make assumptions about what else could be banned is the slippery slope fallacy. Saying what exactly constitutes unacceptable speech on a given platform just needs to be specifically defined.
And the point I'm making isn't that you would eject all communists and capitalists in practice, it's that you would have to do so in a consistent application of that principle. It's a reductio ad absurdum. You can take anything and find a tenuous connection from there to something terrible, so arguing that we have to ban the anything because allowing it would enable an influx of people connected to the something terrible is ridiculous. Applied as a consistent principle it would require you to ban everything.
Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context.
Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).
Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?"
Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.
A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...”
This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message.
By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.
The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there.
Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots.
It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.
These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.
I find that there is usually a fairly small number of "gotcha" questions that come up over and over for a particular topic. the "trans people in competitive sports" question in this thread is a good example. what makes these types of questions rhetorically effective is that they're usually at least half-rooted in truth. in my experience it's more effective to recognize the likely gotchas and have a response ready, or better yet, preempt it entirely. at the very least, you should explain why you're not answering the question, lest it appear that you are the one arguing in bad faith. you have to keep in mind that you're not just trying to convince your interlocutor but also your audience.
Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have.
Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.
Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.
I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias.
I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing.
So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
Not only are these viewpoints, which you claim can only be argued in bad faith, supported by empirical evidence, but the people who dare to support them publicly are risking social and financial ruin. If "unsafe" and "marginalized" do not describe their situation, then the words have no meaning.
As a minority from one of the groups at the unflattering end of the crime rate distributions, it is my lived experience that the type of censorship you are advocating for is what makes me feel unsafe.
Inconvenient empirical truths about my community can not be discussed in the sort of polite and caring settings where the seeds of real solutions that don't ignore reality could germinate.
Instead, they can only be discussed in rude and hateful settings.
The framework that fits the evidence and the ideals was
1) we want a market place of ideas to function
2) there is content that easily dominates and sidelines all other ideas.
3) there are Maliciously engineered arguments that need complex rebuttals to Massive emotional payloads, which will never be accepted.
4) cat videos, pictures and memes will out perform everything else
We let things be for a long time. Very light touch approaches. It doesn’t work. The good ideas will become irrelevant before theY are even read, and that is long after bad ideas redefine reality.
The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth.
If reality must be perceived, and the perception system is flooded, then it doesn’t matter how good our science or reason is. The system is still blind.