...but it is exactly that isolation that create the bubble induced amplification of hate-speech.

If everyone was forced to exist on the same platform (as a though experiment) then hate-speech would have to co-exist with rational thinkers and their hateful ideas might not propagate much.

...but the moment you ban/deplatform/censor/etc... then they begin to form isolated groups with no counter-balance of rationality.

There is already no counter balance.

Breaking up their platforms into smaller pieces is actually helpful and will keep them from readily finding new members on the internet.

I’ve tried to have a calm and reasonable discourse with people who believe in things like QAnon, anti-vaccination theories, the “deep state”, GMO conspiracies, among others, and I’m a single voice among however many hundreds or thousands of others they are listening to. No amount of evidence or rational argument will sway these people because they are swimming in a sea of voices reinforcing their views.

I’m not sure if deplatforming is the right solution here but I also don’t know what the alternatives are. Should we let them keep espousing and spreading patently false information that is actually causing harm to society to a large audience and hope that people just ignore it? That doesn’t seem like a good solution, either.

Every time big tech bans or suspends a user, another supporter of Trump is born.

I think that's a US thing. Other countries seem to be genuinely more rehabilitative. Looks like 55% of the state prison population is there for violent offenses: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Handling non-violent offenders away from the violent ones might be a good start.

That being said, what do we do in this situation (which is a common one I see in these kinds of debates)?:

- Group A claims X.

- Person N asks Group A to provide evidence for their claim X.

- Group A cannot provide said evidence, or the evidence provided is unreliable/cannot be validated.

- Person N asks for additional evidence that the claim X made by Group A is true.

- Group A insists they are right and refuses to provide any additional evidence for claim X.

- Person N chooses to not believe Group A’s claim X due to a lack of evidence.

What’s the next step? Assuming good faith on the sides of both parties, how do you reach some sort of agreement or conclusion?

And what do we do when claim X made by Group A is one that leads to violence or other societal harms (such as an increase in death and suffering due to the spread of disease in the case of anti-vaccination theories)?

I don’t have a good answer, here. I desperately want to have rational and productive conversations with people with whom I disagree. But how do you avoid a deadlock situation like the above?

Recall my post that evidence cannot sway "person N".

*Btw, usually there are more then two sides: it's just stale majoritarian system which leaves people just two unsatisfactory choices in US.

But that assumes both sides are operating in good faith - it's pretty clear in the example that A are not (as are some sides in the real world.)

Not only is that game of whack-a-mole unsustainable, it will lead to the creation of un-silencible platforms. ...and if they are scalable they might become the new standard.

It will be pretty sad if social media platforms are ultimately displaced by the platforms created due to their censorship.

From a platform perspective, there isn't much difference between companies curtailing the use of their platforms to carry out violent activity and those platforms curtailing other illegal activities such as spamming or malware distribution.

We don't consider sending 1 million unsolicited emails free speech, and wouldn't consider a gang using reddit to co-ordinate free speech. Is there any difference for groups coordinating the violent overthrow of an elected democracy?

(1) Rationality is not a counterbalance to implacable, violent division when there is a fundamental conflict of value. Rationality is just ruthlessly optimized maximization of one's own utility function.

(2) For those things where rationality in principal could be a counterbalance, the problem is that people (all of them) are not rational (rationality is an abstract, unattainable ideal), and the ways in which certain people are irrational can minimize the effect of what partial rationality other people in the group they are incorporated into have.

When a group tries to exclude certain ideas from general conversation, it tends to be ideas whose expression is seen as indicateling one or both of (a) irreconcilable conflict of values with values that the rest of the groups sees as table stakes, and/or (b) incorrigible and toxic-to-the-group irrationality in assessment of reality and pursuit of values, whether or not these values are compatible with the group’s values.

So, in either case, the decision is not made in a lack of awareness that isolation removes, int he abstract, rationality as a counterbalance in the conflict between the core group and the excised group, it's is made instead because of the belief that rationality does not function as such a counterbalance with the concrete group targeted for excision, and indeed that the presence of that excised group mitigates the function rationality otherwise would serve as a counterbalance to conflicts within the core group.

The first such group that comes to mind is Heaven's Gate, which I think illustrates the opposite:

A brief reading of Wikipedia suggests to me that key members arrived in place via media attention, even though they spent significant other effort trying to recruit members.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group...

I'm not sure where the sitting is, but the ones radicalizing right now don't get a counter opinion.

Teaching with current level of science as hard baseline is already a place where some western countries like US fail (ie evolution vs creationism topic).

I don't think the change I mention is in direct interest of many governments, so its more like a pipe dream and an additional burden on parents to drill this into their kids.

- clarity: while not everything has a right or wrong answer, but lots of things do

- robustness: it's okay for people to disagree with you, and also for you to be wrong and learn from it

- reason: avoiding the standard fallacies

- agreeing to disagree: individuals you know/interact with and your relationships with them are more important than abstract tribes you may or may not belong to

How do you teach someone to self-analyze and understand where their problems are actually coming from? To question their own conclusions and rethink what they know?

Still, it's possible to improve the current education system, by a lot. The current "learn this, don't ask why" doesn't work, and to make it worse, parents can be just as uninformed and stubborn as their kids, so they'll come to school raising hell over their lil' precious' bad grades.

In the case of political discourse, that may improve the case around some 'fringe theory' concepts which add fuel to the fire, but it's not going to stop the core 'fire', which is driven by philosophy/ethics/metaphysics.

People need to be able to break the 'fourth wall' in these debates in order to question their philosophical biases, and empiricism-as-answer-to-all-problems is also a philosophical bias - eugenics was seen by many as 'scientific virtue' in the 1920s, as one obvious example

2. No speech limitations should be placed on online discussions unless it deviates away from rational debate.

3. Newsfeeds are sorted by popularity AND scientific accuracy.

4. All opinions about an issue, article, or topic are categorized and mapped on a spectrum. Meta data for quick analysis: how does my opinion compare to my peers?

I hope I still, before I'm banned, managed to demonstrate that it is nigh impossible to tell the difference between the most extreme satirical absurdly totalitarian opinion, and actual "progressive" thought these days. And now they have both chambers.

As long as the Internet exist, ( not only the Web, but the Net ) you are only pushing these people to other places. And possibly to an invitation only sub group. They will form its circle in Telegram or other means of media. A bit slower than they first appeared. But the power of internet meant that movement is still relatively quick. And with the power of Hyperlink, news and information spread just as fast as they are in a single group.

So the platform isn't Facebook, Twitter or Youtube, It is the Internet. Or the name information super highway really describe the point better. Which sort of brings the question of regulating the internet but we wont go into that for now.

There is another point wroth mentioning. The making of decent fake news that cant be easily rebutted is far easier than the time and money required to spent for Fact Checking. Not to mention most people dont bother Fact Checking in the first place.

Having been on the other side of the fence with freedom of speech taken away, I agree with parent and grand parent;

Freedom of speech is of extremely high importance for any free society and should not be taken for granted

I think deplatforming is a bad solution to this problem.

I think the free speech issue may be a little overblown here. I would be really concerned if cable companies stop carrying Fox News, but I get that this is a slippery slope. However, I think at the end of the slippery slope is not really the end of free speech, but rather two completely separate echo chambers each with its own mega distribution channels.

For example, Democrat leadership could promise to hold another election immediately after the vaccination is complete. In addition, to persuade trump supporters, they could consider getting rid of mail-in ballots, and legislating a Democratic version of voter ID law.

It's the democratic solution as well. Democracy should be about appealing to the largest possible percentage of population, and shutting up the other side is not a democratic solution to the current US crisis.

Republicans don't like mail-in voting because it makes it a lot easier for the entire population to vote, and they have been spending the last few decades making it a lot harder for people who are not rich white suburbanites to vote.

Neither the Democrat nor Republican establishments want that either. After all, rigging primaries or engaging in other dubious activities would be much too hard.

[1] I am using "coerced" a bit loose here, I am including both "vote X, or else" as well as "if you vote X, I will give you this $SUM money". If it is by structure impossible to show that you complied, it is less likely that either will happen.

The chain makes the system completely and easily auditable. You can't easily game the system. Votes can be easily tallied and randomly sampled to ask voters if the votes match up.

As to repercussions, you already sign your ballots and register to vote. Because of this, there's pretty much no stopping government repercussions if they chose to take action.

Most importantly, it gets rid of all the election fraud debate.

Note that I am not saying that widespread fraud actually occurred in this election...there was no evidence of it, in large part because the laws were setup so that there wouldn’t be. But that isn’t really the point. It could have occurred and nobody could ever prove it, short of the perpetrators themselves coming forward to admit what they did.

Unless something changes before 2024, there is no longer any point in bothering to cast your vote. When anyone can vote without having to prove that they are eligible, and can do it remotely, it renders all votes meaningless.

However I think any pressure towards in-person voting MUST be accompanied by an expansion of rights in terms of how far polling places are from you, a national holiday where everyone gets the day off work, sizeable transportation stipends, etc. Without all of that, requiring people to vote in person is de facto disenfranchisment.

And furthermore, with regards to 2020, I disagree with you wholeheartedly. I think everyone had a right to no-contact voting this year due to COVID. It was a special set of circumstances.

With regard to 2020, the changes to the laws that occurred could have been entirely well-intentioned. They probably were. But those changes have led to the current crisis of confidence in the election results, and rightly so.

I can't find any evidence for this. Further, at least where I live, ballots are mailed to voters and include a control number that ensures only one vote is counted for that person.

Then there is the issue of dead people that have not been removed from the voter rolls. We know for a fact that in 2020, many of these were returned, filled out, likely by family members. That alone is an issue (example: https://youtu.be/CINHx-z9cbk ).

Here is an article with an overview of some of the laws that were changed/relaxed in 2020. Generally speaking, each relaxed restriction opens up more and more avenues for fraud:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/states-changed-rules-voting-...

You claim fraud and offer a video as proof. The video contradicts you. In it they explicitly say, a few times, there wasn't any fraud.

Further, at least in this election, voting and registering to vote were one in the same in many jurisdictions. Many states automatically sent out mail-in ballots to everyone that was registered. All that had to be done from there was to fill it out and send it in. Families of dead people sent in those ballots in many cases.

Registering to vote as someone else, or as an entirely fictional person, is absurdly easy in many jurisdictions. In California, for instance, one can skip any identity checks by simply marking two checkboxes: one indicating they have no ID, and one indicating they have no social security number [1]. Voila, you are now a registered voter. Combine this absurdity with automatically sent out mail-in ballots in many states, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

[1] https://covr.sos.ca.gov/

The Republican Secretary of State ran an election audit in 2016 and found that, over 2+ million votes cast, around 50 or so were "fraudulent," most of those being cast by people who voted in Oregon and elsewhere.

Vote-by-mail is not problematic, if you consider the historical evidence provided by places that have been doing it for a while.

That is the party line, but you have no way of actually knowing that. The election audit to which you refer has no way of knowing how many votes were cast by identities that were simply invented because of the ease of registration in many states (which has now been combined with proactive sending of mail-in ballots, thanks to COVID). Sure, they can tie together people who voted in more than one state, but that isn’t the attack vector that anyone with any sense would use. Show me a good way of identifying brand new identities used to vote in states where there are easy ways to bypass ID requirements (such as California). There isn’t.

[1] https://covr.sos.ca.gov/

Consider that an investigation (that includes said identity check), concluding with a recount happens

• mandatory by design to a random small subset of voting districts

• everytime someone reports to the voting commission an indication or outright evidence of irregularities or fraud

• everytime there is a difference between head-to-head candidates smaller than a certain percentage

If GP is right and "nothing pans out", then that means that the CA Secretary of State web site is not an effective tool to commit voting fraud.

¹ A common analogue is: "I do not believe in gods. Theists can change my mind when they bring forth evidence that measures up to the extraordinary claim. In the last couple of thousands of years, this did not happen. Thus, I will live my life as if gods do not exist."

Absence from where? It is perfectly legal to not have an ID or social security number. Not having those things proves nothing. And nobody is going to track down everyone in the country with the same name and DOB that you selected and ask them if they are the Fred Wilson (example) that voted in California. People move all the time, so it wouldn’t be unusual if they went by the house and that person doesn’t live there.

The way that system is setup to accept voters without ID verification, there is not a way to legally disprove that the person with whatever name and DOB chosen does not exist (assuming more than 1 other person in the country shares those characteristics). Hence it would be impossible to legally prove that this invented person isn’t real.

I literally just showed how shockingly easy it is for anyone to invent California voters in a matter of seconds. That’s exceptional in my opinion. I could write a script that would register 10k of those in several minutes. But the more likely scenario is that I can’t be the only one that has realized this...nobody knows how many people are doing this once or a few times.

That is the whole point of this conversation - the possibility of incredibly easy, undetectable fraud renders all votes meaningless because we simply don’t know how much occurred and there is no way to find out because the rules are so loose. Until they are changed, it completely negates any point in voting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_St...