This sort of reductionist argument doesn't work. If you start from the premise "any chance of dying is not worth it", then you won't do much of anything. Driving to the store could kill you, so now you can't go to the store?
You have to look at probability when assessing risk. Is a 0.0000001% reduction in your risk of death worth sacrificing all your personal freedom? I think most people would say no.
We are not talking about isolated incidents or hypothetical scenarios. Extremists in the US and Europe are becoming part of the political mainstream because so many people believe the extremist propaganda they are reading on social media platforms. Those same extremists have inspired an increasing number of terrorist attacks as their propaganda has spread. For someone like me, someone who is part of a minority group that is frequently targeted by those terrorists, that represents an immediate and growing danger.
Really though, this entire debate is poisoned by extreme positions on free speech. I remember watching as unmoderated Usenet groups were overrun by neonazis; everyone fled to moderated newsgroups or off of Usenet altogether to some better-moderated platform. Free speech absolutism has never worked well and it is juvenile to pretend that the choice is between "sacrificing all your personal freedom" or taking an absolutist approach to free speech.
I will not sacrifice free speech for added protection from terrorists.
https://franklinpapers.org/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=21&page=497...
I think less important than the nuance of what Franklin meant in any specific statement, is that what most people mean when they use that quote is its literal meaning, and that if you look at Franklin's life and body of work he was clearly a staunch defender of the idea that Liberty is a God-given (or inherent) right of mankind, and one worth defending.
Let me fix it:
Those who would sacrifice freedom for temporary security will eventually lose both and deserve neither.
- me, 2021
Doesn't quite carry the same weight with my name behind it, but I stand by it nonetheless.
What do the words “liberty”, “purchase”, and “security” mean in this quotation?
As best as I can tell:
- liberty: the right to be sovereign and able to defend oneself
- security: safety from having taxes levied
- purchase: the guys being taxed said instead “look, we’ll give you money this one time instead but we don’t want you to have the right to levy taxes”
Okay, I guess that makes sense.
“It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.”
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Are you calling me an extremist?
Right now we are missing one of our best chances to end the COVID pandemic -- widespread vaccination -- because too many people are spreading lies about the vaccine on social media.
There is plenty of room for legitimate political debate, where people passionately advocate their preferred policies on various issues, without having to give a platform to people who are not arguing in good faith and whose real purpose is to advance a violent agenda. The cost of "free speech" is not "giving terrorists a platform to recruit and spread propaganda" and the politicians of Ben Franklin's generation actually did understand that (shortly after his death Congress passed the Sedition Act, which banned false statements about the US government to prevent foreign agents from destabilizing the newly formed country).
That's mostly a trust issue. If you silence their concerns you're just going to confirm that it's a grand conspiracy theory. You have to fight misinformation with the truth, with dialog, not with censorship.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows
How do you explain these “12 people” aren’t immediately shut down with all the facts?
Especially when you need to "win" with over 95% of the population and not just a plurality or majority.
Also sadly some news media, some politicians, (don't know about labor unions sadly would not be totally surprised)some celebrities and vested interests are pushing harmful anti-vax agenda that hurts everyone.
During the 1980's early internet, white supremacist groups were among the first[0] to being using the new medium for organization and information purposes. They used it then to publish among other things a list[1] of "race traitors" etc including name, address, phone number, promulgate misinformation, gaslighting established norms and history (ex: Holocaust Denialism), and develop strategies for what can really only be described as terrorist indoctrination in many respects.
Some of the group involved killed a man with automatic weapons and hijacked an armored car with millions in cash to finance a separatist uprising. One of these was Louis Beam[2] who was a quite violent seditionist, and developed the "lone wolf" militia cell structure which is familiar today. Beam used these telecommunication/internet networks to create and distribute a lot of white separatist information. His activity goes on and on, it is quite vile in all respects. He has been charged and acquitted of sedition.
In this academic piece by sociologist Chip Berlet[3], he recounts attempting to counteract the white supremacy BBS with an anti-racist BBS at an Anti-Klan symposium. The understanding of BBS was quite poor at the time. By the 1990's the white-supremacist BBS network had grown quite a bit, distributing newspapers and operating file transfer and messaging services into a national network of neonazi BBS including Stormfront[4], which is of course still in operation, and is quite influential. They successfully transitioned to the ordinary internet and also AOL, using them as very effective recruitment tools.
Neonazi/white supremacist/separatist/seditionist groups have used the internet very effectively pretty much from the beginning. Perhaps this is an effect of Johnathan Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[5] as well as some kind of operationalized Poe's Law--race rallys thrive in protective shade. KKK marches and the like are routinely confronted by anti-racist counter-protests, but the current nature of online discourse continues to provide an asymmetric advantage to these types of activities. The old "Filter Bubble" doesn't lend many opportunities for normal people to insert themselves in the radicalization process...this could possibly be better than worse.
The literature on this is vast, exploring how a normal person can become radicalized into a racist white separatist is a strange rabbit hole to descend.
There exists a kind and inspiring man named Daryl Davis[6] who is pretty good at converting KKK/supremacists (he has many surprising success stories) away from this kind of behavior, but notice how his methodology requires a personal touch and much compassion. How many "more people saw that and immediately criticized the neonazis who wouldn't have seen them before?" is not a very good discriminator for this activity at all. Effectively, "None" is the real answer to your question.
The fact of the matter is that toxic memes and divisive trolling are consumed by people while on the can, idle-ly (or perhaps compulsevly) skimming social media and whatnot. The uncritical ingestion of this kind of thing simply habituates people to these kind of beliefs. I don't think a person who has fallen for this stuff is necessarily bad at first blush, and surely have many possibilities for redemption, but the effort required is really not the kind that is easily rallied.
It's a complicated notion, but it boils down to the fact that you have to fight Hate with Love.
[0] - https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-early-internet-5e9167...
[2] - https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/15/us/computer-network-links...
[3] - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.552...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)
[5] - (original source unavailable) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade#%22Greater_Intern...
[6] - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/18/daryl-davis-bl...
What is the population the KKK right now? What percentage of America is that?
Don't get lost in the narratives.
I'm being very sincere I want to get to the truth. If one person of a specific group does something bad and it gets mainstream news does the size of that group and overall impact it has increase? Of course not.
If there are less neonazis now than in the early days of the internet then doesn't that mean that having the ability to see their information actually exposed their bad ideas and allowed people to see them for what they actually are? Consider it.
As you are well aware, it is a material thing how the structure of this kind of indoctrination occurs in society and this I have adequately described, albeit very briefly, as it has a long and colorful history.
I would like to answer your question in another fashion: Is Stormfront the KKK?
In the censored system, people in power can kill you, censor any talk about it, and no one will ever know.
If an actual terrorist organization is doing this, as defined by the FBI, then our government should be in charge of handling that.
Terrorist is already illegal, and we already have government organizations, in charge of tracking that stuff down.
And those government organizations have checks and balances, and judges, and have to follow certain rules.
These checks and balances do not exist, with other forms of moderation.
When you allow the powerful to define "dangerous speech". Criticism of the government very quickly becomes dangerous when it's successful.
We've seen it with everything related to covid where in some countries people get arrested for "misinformation".
The slippery slope many warned about is very real, and very damaging.
Despite very strict censorship laws related to nazi propaganda, nazi symbolism, and Holocaust denial, Germany ranks much higher than the United States in terms of press freedom and has ranked higher for many years. There is no serious argument that (modern, reunified) Germany is not a free society where people are free to criticize the government. Yes, there are limits to the ideas that are allowed to be publicly promoted or debated, because the same concerns about a resurgence of nazism remain relevant today (it has actually become worse in recent years).
The abuse of censorship laws on the part of dictatorships is not an argument against all censorship, any more than the abuse of the courts by dictatorships is an argument against the rule of law. Expansive censorship is a problem that works against the interests of a free society, but limited censorship is sometimes necessary to promote the interests of a free society.
Mine is a safer proposition for the oppressed, for the minorities, for those not algined with the politics of the elites.
The whole argument about Nazi resurgence really falls flat when you realize that people get called Nazis for spousing wrongthink politics.
Your whole proposition is "the dangers of Nazism are too great". That's the same tactic I mentioned of "the dangers of communism" are too great.
If you want, ignore dictatorships. The slippery slope in non dictatorships is extremely damaging.
You're not gonna limit your censorship either, as you suggest in your last line. You're going to use it against your political foes to continue in or seize power.
Your motte and bailey tactics to get people to accept "some censorship for their own good" and then censor their speech that goes against your politics by calling it "Nazism" is a way bigger threat than the actual chance of "Nazi ideology". There was a time the ACLU safeguarded the right to say the most abhorrent of views the same you make sure due process is served even with the alleged most abhorrent criminals.
It benefits everyone.
The unfortunate truth is that terrorist organizations use mainstream social networking sites to recruit and radicalize. We are sitting here talking about how power has been concentrated and how everyone is subject to censorship -- as if we did not just spend a decade watching ISIS and violent white nationalist groups amplify their messages by evading the controls that existed in legacy media outlets. "This is why we can't have nice things" is the expression that comes to mind...