"On January 6, armed Trumpist militias will be rallying in DC, at Trump's orders. It's highly likely that they'll try to storm the Capitol after it certifies Joe Biden's win. I don't think this has sunk in yet.[...] To be clear here, I don't think the 3%ers, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers or boogaloo types are going to seize the Capitol. But some of them are going try. And people will die."
https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1341016471795843080?s...
Don't spin this into some borderline gas-lightning argument about letting more of these people run rampart on platforms, this is a result of not taking far-right extremism seriously. If these people faced the full force of the law and state like ISIS-propagandists do you would not see them try to storm (and succeed) to occupy a federal building.
Am I a broken clock, or are you just out of touch with the fragmented landscape of political commentary on the internet?
Should we hope the clock is still broken? Because I for one, am going to be watching from a safe distance away (not in person) and fearing for the lives of many people and our democracy on that day.
Save this comment: 4chan will be the next victim and the rest of the internet will say “good”
There might be some large crowds in response to all of the recent deplatformings, but at least some conservatives are claiming that no such events are planned on at the capitols and that the media is inflating the story.
Your guess is as good as mine though. There are so many lunatics in America that anything might happen. Hopefully whatever attempts at violence are made will be unsuccessful.
sure but how is letting them on twitter helping with that, are there fewer russian trolls on twitter? These dedicated sites are literally 100% concentrated insight into these communities
Authorities in particular, I'm supposed to believe the folks at Homeland Security can't go to Parler and do some open-source intelligence and we need to let the trolls on Facebook instead? It's not like we accidentally pushed the perps into the scary darknet and need the IT guys from CSI, they were literally announcing this stunt proudly to the world, I just don't follow the argument at all.
In fact if the riot hadn't been successful I'd have said Parler is a honeypot because people registering with their ID posting openly that they're starting an insurrection is just too absurd.
No, he's not.
> An armed militia is a very different beast from a unarmed but violent right-wing protestor.
The groups that attacked the Capitol were armed with a variety of weapons.
By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.
You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.
It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.
The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.
The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.
I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.
But HN might be unique in that regard? Or maybe there's just a scale beyond which it doesn't work?
It has also made me aware of how well-researched many HN user's opinions are on both sides. My opinions have largely been formed in conversations with young people of the liberal city I live in. They will cheer at anything that attacks whoever they see as their opponents, regardless of the research quality or partisan tone behind them. I have received a far greater range of perspective from brilliant HN users on both sides, which has prompted me to take a step back and re-evaluate how I am writing about this incendiary topic.
There are to many of them for a [private] person to really look at all the programs but that out of many many hundreds of millions (in and outside the us) no one bothered to look at any of them rules out objectivity by the full 100%
It means people get all of their information from other people who also know nothing. Information limited to the top 2 groups. If team blue gets all of its information about team red from other team blue members you will have a similar total exclusion of reality.
End of the day you have to get off the ledge yourself either way based on the information you've gathered.
If we want you to know what anarchy, communism or Christianity are we should have you talk wiht the anarchist, the communist or the christian.
You bring up a good point about people behaving differently in in-person conversations and even perhaps being more willing to change their minds. I think there's a lot of truth there, but I think it comes from thinking that our online personas aren't real and from being physically distanced from the effects of what we say online.
It never occurred to me that my sarcasm online would be a factor in a friend's suicide, but now I live with the consequences of not understanding the very real effects of the things I said.
The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.
I'm not claiming a "bad apples are always planted" conspiracy theory, but it does worry me how easy it is to do so and create a destructive narrative if you really wanted to.
Whereas if you're just trolling in a general platform, most likely outcome is that you'll get called out for it from both sides and that's about it.
BLM protestors didn't show up with a guillotine
This was setup in front of the mayor's house in Portland OR:
https://twitter.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1297421944799686658
—
I am starting to question if people do not realize this activity has been going on for many months in cities across the country.
Why the media kept this relatively quiet (now and previously) is beyond comprehension for most people aware at this point.
The media is divided and therefore, our people are also divided.
If two people can’t agree what/when/if past events occurred, how can anyone discuss, much less agree on the current events?
In other words, perhaps people should consider that any opinions formed re: politics were likely formed from/by the media they consumed.
If we know the media has lately been “one-sided” (yet coming from all sides), perhaps we should be a bit more vigilant to not make assumptions about “another side” if we are unwilling to look at that side - outside the lens of the “great filter”.
IIRC, the great filter is what Elon Musk calls it, at least that’s my understanding of the meaning.
The instant outrage of today - solely based on what the media is presenting - is at the very least - a possible attack vector for outside or even internal forces.
It is my opinion that folks need to better understand this before becoming immediately outraged.
It’s up to a person to determine what side they want to present to others politically, but having an understanding that most people won’t review “all sides” before discussion can help keep “toxicity” in-check upon the inevitable disagreement that will come after posting any political statement.
This is why it’s an attack vector, and why the attack works. It works based on the likelihood that most won’t even look, yet will make assertions as if they did.
This is lie. Social networks were not banning for "simply slightly disagreeable speech".
Yet racial diversity at universities and in corporations is highly sought after and supported by all kinds of measures.
Perhaps political diversity should be added into the mix. It would be consistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klob%C3%A1sn%C3%ADk
[1] Here are the listings for "kolaches" from HEB, a very popular grocery chain throughout most of Texas: https://www.heb.com/search/?q=kolaches
> By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
What kept 'regular people' from hopping on 8ch and stopping Christchurch by talking him down? Fun fact: The whole thing was well known in advance and even observed online by law enforcement.
Point is, the argument doesn't hold up. Bubble or not, things like these are accessible in every way for almost everyone. The problem is that it's not taken seriously. This has nothing to do with isolation. Simply no one cares, that's what it is. There is just too much of this on the internet at any time. Are you supposed to go after every hate comment? How would that work? It doesn't. It's just too much, even with regularly banning people.
What kept 'regular people' from hopping onto a widely derided and supposedly extremist platform, where threats of exposure of ones personal life simply for being there stopped them from noticing extremism?
Are you sure that is a good argument?
Firstly, almost no average FB or TW user knows of those forums, let alone the ones that do being willing to also 'go there' given all the stigma.
My point still is, if you force these people into places like that, where their plans are easily observable, and 99% of people wont go there then it will fester in silence.
Whereas the other potential is..sunlight. Let them say their statements in the sunlight, rather than ban them.
1. Family or friends will banter them down
2. Friends of friends will bring them to center rather than extreme (on EITHER side)
3. its one place rather than 35 distinct forums for LEO to follow.
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20190317214903/https://www.bbc.c...
> Are you sure that is a good argument?
It was live streamed on FB. I think the argument holds up.
Good.
Better they fester in silence in a place where they can be observed and reported to authorities when they cross the line. Without a popular, legitimate, high traffic platform that allows them to influence a mass audience the cancer doesn't metastasize.
I can't banter my own mother into giving up whatever conspiracy theory crosses her path. There are so many people with equally poor fact-checking and critical thinking skills that they form their own festering bubbles on popular platforms. The bigger the bubbles, the more extreme they get, and now the end result is a confederacy of deluded, violent extremists sacking the capitol. We're lucky it wasn't worse, but this might be a dress rehearsal for far more violence if we don't get a better grip.
Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.
At least 75,000,000 people think one way. Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?
I gather, as a late night estimate, 75,000,000 people talking to about another 55,000,000 people why they are right.
And you want to force them all into darkness, unable to engage in the political discussion.
Madness. Absolute Madness.
Nobody is denying these people the right to speak openly, and it's ridiculous to paint with this broad of a brush. The overwhelming majority people are perfectly decent, have normal lives, and don't go around making violent threats or spreading absurd, easily disproven conspiracy theories.
There is an infinitesimal minority who are toxic, deluded extremists. Giving them equal footing on huge platforms with global reach helps them spread their poisonous ideas to a still-minority, but vastly larger group. That subsequent small minority which they infect are able to wreak much greater havoc. Parler was a perfect example of this in action.
> Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.
To this point, I would direct your attention to the Rwandan genocide, a perfect example of what can happen when you give a mass media platform to people who advocate murderous extremism. The genocide was incited by extremist radio shows spouting conspiracy theories and hatred.
I've read quite a few, and they don't bear out your description at all.
> Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.
Not really, not really, and really not.
> At least 75,000,000 people think one way
74,222,593 people conclude, for a wide variety of different reasons, at a particular point in time, to vote for a particular candidate. But even those 74,222,593 people don't “think one way”; if that wasn't obvious from, oh, actually listening to them at the time or having a basic understanding of humans, it's pretty damn obvious right now, when in defeat the Republican Party which was, if nothing else, pretty unified in electoral support for Trump, (much less the broader group of Trump voters which necessarily included a substantial number of non-Republicans) has been turned against itself with great intensity by Trump’s post-election actions, starting with the election challenges and escalating through the Trumpist attack on the Capitol.
> Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?
No one is interested in denying the vast majority of the people who supported Trump in the last election the right to speak openly. You are railing against a strawman.
Had social networks not, over the last 10 years, been consistently banning anyone and everyone they could for everything ranging from simply slightly disagreeable speech all the way to flat out illegal speech, you would not have needed a massive analysis of data from one-off sites. The crowd sourcing and eyes on the information of regular people could have predicted it.
By creating even more and more internet bubbles, the 'regular people' do not even see what the 'irregular people' are up to anymore. They cannot talk them down from their ledge, there is no intercommunication now.
By isolating people who moderates consider extreme, on either side, creates divided communities of extremism. This should seem like an obvious outcome.
https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...