The only way that this works is to exert total control of the content of all communications.
Otherwise, as in the real world until now, people find each other and network. You're talking about destroying freedom of association and expression in order to root out reprehensible people with the wrong values who could speak to people who want to listen to them.
I'm not advocating for some global censorship entity.
Ideology is not a protected class, however. In the case of Haidt, they are free to not present any research at conferences unless it advances their definition of equity, and he has no choice but to go along with it or walk away.
It's worth pointing out that they are not explicitly turning down non-equity-focused research, but that the existence of the question is his interpretation of an ideological pressure to conform.
If it even existed in the first place; there are plenty of laws that expressly allow discrimination in deference to 'religious beliefs.'
Courts, & the Supreme Court in particular, are giving far more weight to 'christian freedom' at the expense of the rest of us.
Cases include recent PrEP ruling, insane football prayer ruling that willfully ignored facts, bathroom & sports laws targeting kids. crazy ruling on prayers in court.
Adoption discrimination (de-facto govt by transitive property. we have to stop outsourcing government to contractors, especially when it makes religious orgs the only avenue).
Upcoming ruling from CO which will probably allow even more queer discrimination.
that 'pressure to conform' is and has historically been one way, giving one class the legal go ahead to discriminate in the name of some skewed idea of christian ideals
If it were not, mosques would be legally compelled to hire rabbis and churches would have to consider hiring druids for services.
Where the line ought to be drawn is nowhere near as obvious as you seem to think it should be.
But this disagreement highlights this major problem the US faces.
We live in two increasingly separate realities with different 'facts', where obvious is totally different based on your identity.
the one religious non-belief class example I gave is the football coach prayer case.
to me it's an obvious overreach and clearly breaks secular education norms (and past scotus rulings).
to such an obvious degree that the minority (on the court, majority in public opinion) broke precedence and put photos directly refuting the 'facts' the majority claim are truth.
that's also a bit spurious. i don't think anyone is arguing that churches must be forced to interview (or hire) other religions.
but the majority does believe that the state & courts shouldn't create laws that expressly allows someone to discriminate or refuse to provide service to someone else just because they are gay or trans or use different pronouns. or deny an adoption. or disallow kids from playing incredibly low states high school sports. or ban books. or not talk about gender & sexuality. i keep using queer-centric issues because that's my identity and I can speak to it better than race/trans issues. there are plenty of examples there too.
it's minority religion dictating laws that affect our lives and explicitly allowing those beliefs to take away rights from the rest of us.
Not true! Just being banned from significant swaths of social media has frequently forced many prominent Nazis/alt-righters out of business. Before Kiwifarms recently had all of their major issues, they were already finding it difficult to keep the site running as a result of continued pressure on every host they switched to.
It also introduces readers to the entirety of the uncensored internet all at once, the most 4-chan thing imaginable, which is somewhat counter to the "limit exposure to disinformation" goal being claimed by the original deplatformers.
And that substantially reduces their reach and ability to disseminate their garbage. It's good.
And yes, they're a bunch of Nazi stooges.
The problem is that people make statements like this but apply them selectively. E.g., platforms like major news networks are happy to give airtime to the claim that people alive today, who never owned slaves and are very likely not descended from anyone who did, must pay reparations to others alive today who were never enslaved and may well not be descended from slaves. These same platforms also give airtime to those claiming all societal ills stem from one ethnic group or another (as long as it's the "right" ethnic group being blamed).
This incredibly skewed double standard isn't fooling anyone.
In both cases the application thereof, while it will not assist at all with getting to the truth of any issue, will certainly allow you to manipulate those you subject to it to tell you whatever you want to hear.
Of course, as soon as they are removed the subject will typically recant, and often overcorrect in the exact opposite direction, in light of the exposure to loathed coerced manipulative strategies.
Sunlight doesn't have that problem. People may make mistakes and come to the wrong conclusion, but at least they won't double down on their erroneous position as a retributive strategy for the coercive manipulation to which they have been subjected.
But hey, maybe some ends are just so awful they justify any means in pursuit of their prevention, be it torture, censorship or whatever. Certainly lots of people these days clearly seem to think so.
He's a black guy who went out of his way to befriend KKK members, and many of them ended up leaving the KKK when they realized he didn't fit what they were told about black people.
Censorship would not have helped, they had to be shown that they were wrong. That's what "sunlight is the best disinfectant" means.
There are many case studies in the real world.
"Go find a racist podcast and see how many episodes it takes for you to start thinking that jews and black people are inferior."
Rwandan genocide being incited over radio, 1930s/1940s Germany being incited by the press and speeches, same with 1930s Japan.
Many mass shooters that targeted specific ethnicities were radicalized online. Dylan Roof. Also the recent guy that wrote the N word on his gun. These were white nationalists. The latter said it wasn't his offline world, it was purely online where he got radicalized.
You're just making assertions that it's not like this but our best understanding of ideas that they are social and contagious.
If you genuinely think listening to racists would turn you into a racist I really do encourage you to try it so you learn you don't need to fear hearing bad ideas.
Researchers and activists spend countless hours doing exactly that, listening to what racists are saying, lurking in their online communities, and analyzing their rhetoric and membership. It doesn't turn them into racists. How is it you think that they don't become radicalized? It's not because they have some kind of power that makes them immune to idea viruses.
If you're too afraid to dive deep into racist speech why not start with something a little less unpleasant and attend a religious service of a faith you don't belong to. It's fascinating to do, most places of worship are very welcoming to newcomers, and again, you really won't be magically converted.
Yes, some people who walk into a church do end up becoming members, just like some people who stumble onto racist online communities do end up joining, but in both cases it's not because exposure to the message has infected them. The actual message itself (in both cases) generally isn't terribly convincing, logical, or consistent. It's very often because they offer people who feel alone and lost a place to be accepted, something besides themselves to blame for their troubles, a clear and narrow path for how to move forward, and a comforting narrative and identity.
If you're happy with who you are and how your life is going, have friends/family who support you, and strong convictions you have nothing to fear from listening to people whose views you strongly disagree with and often you'll have a lot to gain from it.
I just gave you evidence that it does by pointing to specific case studies throughout history. You then proceed with an assertion that it doesn't, backed up by you saying that less than 100% of people who view racist material become racists (well, of course, not everyone that's exposed to a virus becomes infected). This discussion is going nowhere.
Also I don't think the Nazis and Hutus were made into racists by academic discussion of genetics, and I don't think that people who study genetic factors of IQ are more likely to be Nazi-sympathetic. It's not like the Nazis were scientific racists, they were pseudo-scientific racists - they started out racist and went on a quest for the appearance of proof.
The pro-censorship side needs to prove the science->racism pathway and then prove that "deplatforming" works to reduce overall belief in or following of that path. Censorship tends to have a whiplash effect to those who notice it which is rarely taken into account by those who preach censorship. (Which is what you'd expect if the people who were doing the censoring didn't care about the issues and were simply using them to bolster their control of the censoring mechanism...)
Yes, racism is bad for the believer and for society but there is no evidence censorship could help and a ton of evidence that it is ruinous to democracies.
I didn't just discuss that. I also discussed mass shooters who were radicalized by these ideas that they read in online forums. No orators.
> Also I don't think the Nazis and Hutus were made into racists by academic discussion of genetics
Scientific racism is just one instantiation of it. Not every bad outcome of racism is going to be traced back to scientific racism.
But I will say that scientific racism was a part of Nazi thought. And the mass shooter who wrote the N word on his barrel, and Dylan Roof, were inspired by scientific racism. You can read his manifesto for yourself, or you can see Dylan Roof's interview on Youtube.
> The pro-censorship side needs to prove the science->racism pathway
I really don't see the point of this. I'm not even talking about science or exclusively about scientific racism. You're the one who pivoted the conversation in that direction.
The whole article is about a professor being forced to politicize and limit his research, presumably because it would be used to justify wrong-think.
To restate more generally though, the censoring side needs to prove the 'reading viewpoints -> copying actions' pipeline. Would a plainly written description of Hitler's beliefs create nazis of those who read it or is it the oration and the cult tactics that do that? If a nazi quotes a book in support of their views does that mean the book would cause someone without those views to become a nazi?
Sun Tzu counsels to know your enemy, how would this work if they were censored?
But it doesn't, unless it is extensive/complete. It just seems like it does because censored media is constantly reassuring us that the censorship is working, and that all reasonable people enjoy it.
You can't destroy ideas by censoring them from the largest outlets, you have to perpetually search out the smallest outlets (e.g. open everyone's mail) to make sure that these ideas aren't still infecting people, multiplying exponentially. You can't relax anywhere, for a moment. The only surefire way to kill or silence ideas is to kill or silence the people who hold them. That means you have to have systems in place to detect stray ideas, and processes in place to eliminate them.
It's not about surefire ways to silence someone. You're setting up a burden that's too high for no good reason. It's about whether it works in practice to an extent.
Does it though? Ideas are hard to kill. Just because you stop people from saying something in public, does not mean they aren't talking about it in private. In fact, oftentimes people even assume the thing you can't talk about must be really important or else they'd let you talk about it. And in turn, it holds more powerful and spreads further. I don't think censorship is really effective at stopping ideas
You say ideas are like viruses. Since when has trying to stop viruses worked?
It also makes sense that it works given our understanding of social contagion.
You're not trying to completely kill the idea. Just reduce its prevalence.
Also we have stopped viruses before, like SARS and Ebola
The way you learn how to defend your opinion is to engage with people who have different opinions, not having affirmation parties with people who are predisposed to agree with you about everything.
Now you and I, hey we know what’s good and morale so that’d be fine. But when it’s someone else who is in control, as it will be, then the “wrong” things get censored.
Prove it.
is it just a grift?
so, censorship may be morally bad or wrong and also very effective, and its the fact that it is effective and working is why there is a very loud objection to it
thats all im pointing out
sorry if maybe we are talking past each other!
And my point is, people can make a big deal about something because they think it's wrong, regardless of whether it ultimately works.
We all have a strong moral obligation to root out "reprehensible people with the wrong values." If you think otherwise then you don't understand what the word "reprehensible" means.
Shaming is a way of silencing people who disagree with you and that only works if you do it as a mob. Otherwise you're just making yourself feel good by expressing your disapproval. Mob shaming at least accomplishes something, individual shaming is just a lazy substitute for persuasion.
People certainly can change over time, but someone's state at a given time is what that person actually is at the time.
In the spirit of fairness, should one actually no-platform everyone using emotional rhetoric?
Your favourite media outlet will almost certainly have a lot less to say if we do. Depending on your PoV, this may or may not be a bad thing.
Of course it's never good to allow bad arguments into the "marketplace of ideas", because then they'll take over the market, but unfortunately that ship has sailed, or likely never arrived.
Q: Who gets to define "relatively harmless"?
"Advocating for peace" sounds pretty harmless, yet if you dare to mention any specifics - at least this year - it seems supporting it is deemed anything but harmless. Before my time, but seems the same applied in 1964 – 1973.
I don't think there's anything wrong with advocating for peace, from a free speech aspect, especially if someone is sincere. (Even if someone is completely brainwashed by whatever propaganda. And even if peace itself is a super meaningless term. After all wouldn't a totalitarian world government bring peace? Etc, etc.)
Each of us defines this for ourselves, using our own moral compass.
Because in a liberal democracy - or anywhere for that matter - not all ideas are of equal value. The same goes for Putin's Russia as it does for, say, Finland. You have to decide what you stand for, a culture has to decide what it wants to value.
Some ideas and actions are quite obviously, objectively anti-life, pro-misery.
Two people saying the same thing or doing the same thing are not inherently achieving the same outcome, pursuing the same end goal, arriving at their ideas from the same place, and so on. All of that matters in a big way.
A liberal, human rights respecting democracy with a constitution is objectively better if human well-being is your standard, than a theocracy. We have many centuries of experimentation and result at this point, no guessing is required.
Which is to say, deplatforming two very different people that are saying entirely different things and attempting to accomplish very different end goals, is not the same thing just because they're both the act of deplatforming.
Shooting and killing an innocent person at random on the street is not the same as shooting and killing a robber that has broken into your home and is intent on harming your family, despite the fact that they both involve you shooting and killing someone. The same exact moral principle is involved in the deplatforming premise.
The problem is that you’re begging the question. You’re assuming that maximizing individual freedom is what serves well being. Most humans disagree with that premise. Studies show, for example, that Christian conservatives are both happier and have more children than other Americans. Those are “objective” measures of “human well being.” Indeed, zooming out, nearly every highly individualistic, secular western society is in decline—to the point where they can’t even take care of their elderly population without importing religious Catholics from Latin America (in the US) or Muslims (Europe). “Ability to propagate one’s culture sustainably” certainly seems like at least one measure of success at serving human well being, no? And on that measure, modern "liberal democracies" are failing.
Now of course there are other ways to measure human well being, and liberal democracies do quite well on those measures. My point is that by 2022, it should be clear that people disagree on what constitutes a good life, and societal progress. In the last two decades, we've seen country after country reject secular liberal democracy. And even in the west, reaction is on the rise. A majority of Hindus, Afghans, and Iowans agree that San Francisco isn't their dream for the future of their own society. And if you want to dismiss that as "they're wrong and we're right," what you're advocating for looks more like a holy war than "liberal democracy."
Uh...reprehensible by whom?
You do realize that what's "reprehensible" is extremely subjective, right? And the same tactics and standards that you are using to silence opinions you don't like can therefore just as easily be used against you and yours by people who find your opinions reprehensible.
That's the whole point of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas, it protects everyone's ability to speak freely. And then individuals can make up their own minds about what is "reprehensible" and choose whether THEY want to listen to it or not. In other words, people don't need you to be an arbiter of what is reprehensible for other adults.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Rational or not, it's better for bad ideas (ignoring the even more pernicious question of who decides which ideas are "bad") to be examined than have them fester in dark corners.
You're talking about whether censorship is a good idea.
Separate discussion.
I suspect that the answer is "it depends on the culture". China seems to have a lot more control over the spread of anti-CCP ideas than Iran has over the spread of anti-regime ideas, and it isn't because of Iranian censors trying less or having worse tools. But the Iranian population seems to be much less conforming and more ready to rebel.
The US has a number of natural experiments that show that censorship is effective at silencing someone. Look at what happened to Trump and Alex Jones after they were deplatformed. Their reach was cut a lot and that wasn't even state censorship.
Russia had a natural experiment after Gorbachev lifted speech codes. People described the renaissance of new ideas being spoken that were previously stifled. Censorship worked.
It makes sense that it works given our understanding of social contagion. People aren't designed to believe facts. They're designed to join a team and believe whatever stuff their team believes in. Things like taboos or censorship or blacklists are effective, however repellent they may be.
If they were invited to speak then they already have an audience. Censoring them is working against the cause of fighting their ideas.
Protest or debate them if you consider their views reprehensible.
On one hand, you are acknowledging that some values are not based on rationality, and on the other hand you think they should be imposed upon those who don't share them by censorship?
They were doing this long before the Internet if that is what you mean! If you mean a platform as in showing up at a prestigious place, well being denied entrance is just as good, you just have your group stand outside and ask "What are they so afraid of? If our ideas are so bad/crazy/etc. can't they just easily shoot them down with social discourse?" and you get all the awareness and revision of the ideas that you want!
Exactly. No platforming is a naked display of power without any pretence at principle. If you can keep the power forever, great. You win. If not, well, turnabout is fair play and if you have no attachment to free speech or the marketplace of ideas yourself and you couldn’t maintain power with the benefit of censorship you’re probably in for a bad time.
Who gets to decide what is acceptable and what isn't?
Our/society's rights and wrongs has greatly changed over time and that is only possible because of both good and bad ideas being heard.
No one person should be deciding what's acceptable for the whole of soceity. Every individual should hear different ideas, good, bad and terrible, and decide for themselves what/who they agree with.
To your point, IIRC, the impact of deplatforming has been studied. Like when that troll Milo got bounced. It greatly diminished their reach and impact.
Sadly, some trolls (Alex Jones) have enough juice to spin off their own bespoke hate machines.
No, they also need a platform to make people aware of their existence, their views, and to recast their censorship to be in their favour. The whole point of no-platforming individuals is to make a statement that their views are seen as reprehensible and to stop them from being able to air those views to an audience.
Not all ideological disputes are about rational argumentation, many are based in a fundamental misalignment of values. Those value-based disputes cannot be resolved by open and civil discourse alone, and we know that racists have a tendency to abuse such spaces through techniques such as emotional rhetoric and Gish galloping.