I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey, maybe don't TIE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND REAL IDENTITY TO THE INTERNET. I suspect the prominent use of pseudonyms 30 years ago prevented most forms of ongoing harassment. Narcissists need the validation and so now big brother needs to step in to protect them.

I think society is getting a little too comfortable with the idea of big brother and it's making me really, really uncomfortable. As an old man yelling at a cloud the internet really was better 20 or 30 years ago.

I take it that (a) your income doesn't depend on your internet presence, and (b) you're reasonably well off. KiwiFarms has done massive damage to people in "the real world", and some people concerned for their safety cannot afford to ignore it. It is a genuine danger.

Violating the principle and right of free speech is nothing more than grabbing and abusing power.

So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat...

An episode like that costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost productive time, police response and investigation etc. And it's increasingly common.

I don't think ISPs can or should proactively try to prevent this (or they'd have to preemptively scan and evaluate every packet request), but I also don't think your dunk on the ACLU has any substance. If an ISP knows that a customer is bad actor because it's brought to their attention in a credible and rigorous way, then it seems quite legitimate to me to cut them off.

Are you trying to say that some opinion posted online that may or may not have been consumed by the offender in this case is somehow directly responsible?

My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?

My question to those that use this line of reasoning is do you really think a ruling power willing to silence dissent would do so whether or not it is supported?

I would argue if we have people in positions of power who would make decisions like that then it is our duty to our progeny to relieve those in question.

The Stasi would be insanely jealous of the new tools for totalitarianism the tech industry is building. We're constructing a digital panopticon around ourselves. If this is allowed to go much further, escape will become incredibly difficult.

Because Mississippi and New York have very different ideas about who are bad actors.

This would invite false-flag attacks to get others kicked off the internet, especially if you run a public-facing service. If you can find any way to attribute something to someone, it doesn't even have to rise to the level of preponderance of evidence.

This changes the venue for addressing allegedly-criminal behavior of owners/operators from courtrooms with established procedures to arbitrary decisions by nameless individuals accountable to nobody. This certainly works to someone's advantage, especially in cases where the allegations have been fabricated or exaggerated. Let's move things to a kangaroo court where a doctored screenshot is sufficient evidence for us to ban someone/something and there is no formal procedure or record for anyone to review. The accused isn't even entitled to an appeal; the accusation is the conviction.

ISPs were really rigorous in their diligence when the RIAA started suing their customers. DMCA takedowns have never been abused either. ISPs have notably not been quick to do anything about the DDoS attacks Kiwi Farms' detractors have brought to bear against them.

For some reason, of all those people "victimized" by Kiwi Farms, not one can muster a defamation suit? Apparently they organize raids or something on a public forum inclusive to all, but no screenshots or archived copies of these pages exist? For all the claims against KF, apparently none can survive scrutiny from either civil or criminal litigation. The one untrained guy that runs it can only be tried in secret tribunals, in absentia, and must not be allowed to have a platform on which to defend himself. This is the cliquish behavior of spoiled children crying to their gullible grandparents as an end-run around their parents-- not a means of justice.

People claim a lot of things about the Kiwis but the one thing nobody ever calls them is liars.

> So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat...

It's unfortunate that a school that went out of its way to host events only for children of color received a bomb threat. That terrorist should go to jail, and by the rules of this New Woke Order someone should send a letter to the school's upstream hosting providers to get that racist school kicked off the internet.

The people pushing for ISP-level policing aren't going to like living under the rules they're creating. It's going to make it completely fucking unusable for everyone. Like the HOA board members who want to run speed traps and install speed bumps to stop all the speeders, they always end up being among the first ones caught speeding. They'll create all these bypasses to make things intolerable, and then start up with "this place sucks now" and try to rally everyone into leaving.

Just say no. Because it worked so well for Nancy Reagan.

Oh, wait...

(For those too young to remember: https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no)

It is not merely the case that, faced with something potentially addictive, you just recall "Just Say No" and bada-bing, no addiction happens. Humans aren't robots. Humans get addicted to drugs and other activities, not just in social situations but also as a coping mechanism for life failures they can't fix, or see no way to fix. It can take years of psychological work to break the cycle of dependence, and in some cases it might not even be possible.

If you have time for a moving speech, listen to Craig Ferguson's monologue on his own alcohol addiction, his path to sobriety, and the constant vigilance needed to maintain it, which he gave rather than joke about Britney Spears' public freakout in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K46P7loICXY

I know there are such people, but they are a small minority. If "addiction" is only talking about them, then the response to the GP is simple: sure, "Just Say No" doesn't work for that small minority, but it can still work for everyone else, and shouldn't be discarded on that account.

My read of the GP is that they were not using "addiction" in this narrow sense, and my response was based on that interpretation. But they're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong about that interpretation.

One recent example of this was the lack of free hospital beds at the height of COVID. In a pandemic, the overoptimization of nixing bed/supply reserves left no slack, leaving hospitals unfit to address the emergency.

That resulted in lots of funding from the anti-Trump crowd. "Trump derangement syndrome" meant previously unimaginable funding.

They needed to do something with the money, so they staffed up, using the new staff to double down on the Trump-fighting.

Before 2016, there were a few claims that the ACLU was biased toward liberals. Afterward, you'll find many articles even from outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times lambasting the ACLU as openly partisan. Just do a search for them!

So if this is censorship is intended to keep things safe and liberal, people suppose that the ACLU would support the censorship.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...

> The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the right to protest when the protesters want to carry guns.

> “Until now,” lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, the ACLU has “never quite come out and announced that they will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there.”

And their internal policy document listing out things that might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of free speech:

https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621ACLU....

> Considerations Specific to Speech Cases

> * Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence

> * Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons

> * The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression

> * The extent to which we are able to make clear that even as we defend a speaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves

> * The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships

I think that the ACLU had a bigger impact with 60m in funding as a nonpartisan organization with a respected reputation than as a soldier in the culture war.

smartphones and modern social media bulldozed over our glorious cyber-libertarian future and brought millions of people, all completely unacclimated to the Web and its social customs, online, together, in the name of social progress or something (but, not-so-secretly, it was just to target advertisements and content to people more efficiently), and this is the sad end result—corporate censorship everywhere, with normal people even going out of their way to espouse gratitude for said censorship, complete with all manner of stock memery to disparage anyone who disagrees ("freeze peach", "only the government can censor—if it's not the government, it's not censorship", etc.).

pour one out for the Internet of Yore if you must, but those days are long since over—there really isn't any way to put the genie back in the bottle anymore.

twenty-five minutes ago, I posted the above comment, then got into my car to drive home from work. on the way home, at an intersection, I checked my phone to see if anyone had responded to my comment, and indeed, you had. I thought about it a bit, then, while waiting in line at drugstore to pick up a prescription, I typed and submitted this reply. this is most certainly not how Things Used To Be. you used to have to jack into the Matrix at a designated jacking-in terminal—you couldn't just wirelessly jack in anywhere, about the town, at any point in your daily life.

only a decade ago, the idea that a politician would use the Internet to directly attack or insult a political opponent was unthinkable—now, it's completely commonplace, as common as anyone arguing over the Internet, with anyone else about anything else. now, it's been successfully integrated into everyday life, completely. in the past, though, there most certainly was a time in which it was a completely separate thing, with completely different social norms than meatspace. I don't know why some are so eager to erase this in-the-greater-scheme-of-things extremely-recent history, and pretend like the Internet was always some sort of sanitized "safe space." there were "safe spaces", to be sure—but you had to make them yourself(!), or seek them out. communities were ideologically-driven, not advertiser/moral guardian-driven.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210608004853/https://www.nytim...

> the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

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

> Beginning in 2017, some individuals claimed the ACLU was reducing its support of unpopular free speech (specifically by declining to defend speech made by conservatives) in favor of identity politics, political correctness, and progressivism.

If only America could export their constitution like they do their weapons

and the Chinese constitution: http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/...

It's not about the constitution.

It exists to varying degrees in various places. It's not absolute in the US, as much as people like to pretend it is - incitement to violence, the old "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" canard, criminal conspiracy, defamation etc etc. There is a line drawn, it's a fuzzy one that people pretend does not exist, but it's there just as it is in other nations.

For more information on how freedom of speech is codified in Europe, for instance, see - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...

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

"Ultimately, whether it is legal in the United States to falsely shout fire in a theater depends on the circumstances in which it is done and the consequences of doing it. The act of shouting fire when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter..."

I was not trying to make the point that it is always illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, that such an act is by itself subject to prohibition, but that it is one of several circumstances in which an act of speech may not be 100% protected by the first amendment in the USA.

I even called it a "canard" because it's something of a cliche and not 100% true as commonly understood.

The point, if anything, is reinforced by this - there is a fuzzy edge to freedom of speech in the USA, even where it is portrayed as absolute.

Another example of illegal speech would be perjury.

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

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

But just because governments have recognized the right does not mean that they are complying with this recognition.

This is par for the course though. The 1st amendment was ratified in 1791 and the Alien and Sedition Acts which violated the constitution in the most blatant way were passed 8 years later.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedit...

Governments never give freedom. People take it.

Indeed, they haven't.

> The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."

i.e. Consider whether we'd be arguing against our own goals.

How anyone reasonable could consider this a bad thing, I don't know.

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...

They've defended people and organizations I oppose, but their reasoning has always been sound.

That the ACLU debates and reflects is admirable.

Because it's completely unproven. Their theory is that 'free speech advances the goals of [others whose views are contrary to our values]' but that's not proven, that's just their theory.

It's held for ages that free speech works as it allows for the 'disinfectant of sunlight' i.e. that ideas stand and fall on their merits with all relevant parties allowed to discuss freely.

They _posit_ that this theory no longer holds true but they never seem to actually explain how they came to that conclusion. You, similarly, just say that is 'is right' but... how did you get there? What's your proof of concept? Do you have examples?

It seems very much to me like they've just turned around and said 'yeah actually free speech is bad because it helps the bad guys more than the good guys, trust us, it's no good' and left it at that.

> reasoning has always been sound

They've done a complete 180 on this position. By definition either their reasoning before was unsound or their reasoning today is unsound. Pick one.

Also not proven ?

As a result, going to bat for the Unite the Right rally in 2017 was a massive misstep and resulted in them losing a large amount of donors and professionals working for them. Naturally they would've needed to change or else they collapse and don't function at all.

Good principles remain good regardless of exceptional circumstances.

> needed to change or else they collapse and don't function at all

Yeah, they changed _and_ they don't function at all. Now they just protect the causes their donors agree with while retaining the prestige of the name.

Personally I think a total collapse would have been preferable.

The ACLU didn't get anyone killed, violent right-wing individuals did. The right to have a political protest rally is enshrined in the Constitution.

Consider the looting and rioting that took place following the George Floyd protests. It would be absurd to suggest that because violence and crime was happening at some of these events, the political speech they represented might not be worth protecting.

So, just to be clear, you are saying it's unreasonable for the ACLU to consider whether a case would directly harm their mission.

Your words say that rather than consider the harm their case will do to their mission, instead, they must blindly defend the case. The result of which could hurt their free speech advocacy.

You might not agree with this interpretation, but that's what you are arguing against here based on your quotes and what I said. If you disagree with my interpretation, you need to rethink what you read because you are clearly misguided.

> It seems very much to me like they've just turned around and said 'yeah actually free speech is bad because it helps the bad guys more than the good guys, trust us, it's no good' and left it at that.

No. You are wrong.

"Free speech is good even when it helps bad people (as proven my our track record), but we will not defend those who attack free speech."

That's what they are saying.

tl;dr: You are wrong and arguing against free speech.

This itself is the bad bit, IMO. My expectation of the ACLU is that they will always defend the rights of individuals, regardless of the goals of those exercising those rights.

When the ACLU defended Nazis marching in Skokie, they weren't defending the goals of Nazis to strip ethnic minorities of rights; they were solely defending first amendment rights.

The logic here seems so fragile that I don't see how one could see it as anything other than a bad thing if they value the ACLU as a bastion for defending rights.

For instance, if a criminal is actively going around and killing people from one political bent or ethnic background, they are clearly not respecting the rights of others.

Should we decide that it's okay to not grant them a speedy trial, since giving a jury the right to free them would definitely get in the way of theother rights we care about?

They've gone so far down the rabbithole, they've come up the other end saying the government needs to take a more active role policing speech.

It does think companies should act on illegal speech; those "companies" are the people/orgs who run websites, like KF. "We should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing". The EFF doesn't think other companies (network carriers, etc.) should act on illegal speech.

The government ought to take a more active role! Would you prefer the courts to affirm your legal rights, or for an oligopoly of private companies to brazenly deny you them, with no recourse?

There are multiple causes: even though it is not the ACLU's fault for the murder at the Charlottesville rally, its public image took a beating. Combine that with the massive influx of new supporters and new money in 2017, in support of the ACLU directly challenging Trump, it now has a lot more partisan supporters than it used to. Donations have tripled. Even if all previous supporters were right-partisan (which would be unlikely), the sudden addition of a bloc of left-partisan supporters, double the size of your previous supporter base, could sway your organisation.

From the NY Times article:

> But in interviews, several younger lawyers suggested a toll taken. Their generational cohort, they said, placed less value on free speech, making it uncomfortable for them to express views internally that diverged from progressive orthodoxy.

> “A dogmatism descends sometimes” inside the A.C.L.U., noted Alejandro Agustin Ortiz, a lawyer with the racial justice project. “You hesitate before you question a belief that is ascendant among your peer group.”

> Some argued for carefully vetting hires. “I never do a job interview without raising Skokie/Charlottesville and asking if they are comfortable with that history,” said a lawyer who asked not to be named because of the fear of inflaming colleagues. “Not many colleagues agree. It’s about the cause.”

It seems there is both an "old guard" and "new guard" within the ACLU, only time will tell if they retain full commitment to defending free speech.

Why is a belief in the common carrier model ridiculous?

And make no mistake, that's 99% of what KiwiFarms does, the last time this came up on hackernews I browsed through hundreds of posts in a bunch of threads to see if there was anything other than that going on, so if its there it's in the DMs (and policing person-to-person communication is utterly insane) or very rare.

It's not so much about the particular site.

Start by banning racists and bigoted users, then slowly start discriminating against other groups while offering new "private connection" for only $9.99/mo extra.

The only reason that those are despicable nowadays is precisely because minorities and their supporters, which were considered despicable at the time, exercised their freedom of speech.

The EFF is so detached from humanity it doesn't mind innocent people dying for it's radical free speech cause. And that's really pretty sad.

Instead on censoring speech why not provide tools that lead to better speech? This is perfectly possible from a tech stand point but companies would rather have the power that comes from censorship.

1. Get rid of anonymity/pseudonymity. Free speech is a right. Anonymity is not. If people had to post everything in their real name you would get rid of all of the fake b.s. and people would be much more civilized in their speech.

2. Provide content filtering tools based on user voting with a public record of user votes and the option for people to turn off the filters so that they can see what is filtered.

With these 2 mechanisms you can create a public square with absolute free speech where hate speech is filtered and suppressed, if people choose that, but the records are clear and people who want to audit the filtering can do so as they please.

The internet has saved many people by opening up questions you wouldn't ask your doctor.

the most popular services (facebook/instagram, twitter) are the ones that have the most real people posting stuff under their real names.

those companies continue to allow fake users for a variety of financial reasons but the fake users are actively degrading the experience.

twitter is working on KYC now, but it is a cheap AI version that is easily exploitable, so it won't make much of a difference (as i understand it so far).

Are you actually fine with this? I can't help but notice you're not posting under your real name...

If they can pick and choose whatever message they like with absolute discretion, then that's effectively the corporation's speech and should be treated as such, with full responsibility over it.

If they don't want to bear the responsibility for what they publish, then it's easy, don't pretend to have the legitimacy to choose.

That the same social media platform can have as big of a change in views as Twitter/X did is insane to me. That's not "the public changing opinion". That's a corporation exercising speech. Full stop.

There is no functional world where no one is allowed to moderate abuse, because in that world the Internet ceases to function. You don't have to like the results, but someone has to do it.

The EFF very much promotes progressive values, more consistently so than the ACLU which has supported "free speech" cases by undesirable folks before and which seems to have led to this supposed "betrayal" when it turned out not to go out of its way to do so in every case.

The problem with "free speech" absolutist organizations is the same as with "free speech" absolutist social media platforms: if your distinguishing feature is to allow everyone to say almost anything, you'll primarily attract those people who want to say things they can't say elsewhere. And this inevitably means you get an overrepresentation of open white supremacists, CSAM enjoyers, teenage edgelords and trolls. And most people don't want to be associated with these kinds of people, so having enough of them around drives out everyone else.

It's the Nazi Bar problem: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar Either you put in effort to make your organization unattractive to nazis, or you become a nazi organization.

most of the internet was not like this 10-15 years ago. forums and even large social media platforms were moderated lightly, if at all. you would commonly see edgelords dropping slurs, but it did not dominate the discussion. I don't think the entire internet would turn into kiwifarms if everyone just decided to relax a bit.

Either you're thinking of a time much further back than 10-15 years (that is, 2008-2013), or you're wrong. Or - could be you were just in the Nazi bars at the time, also. My experience in a variety of online places at that time was that "edgelords" got told off or kicked out in most. A few places didn't, and they were already or became the Nazi bars. Alternately, the Nazis would be herded into a smaller subset of the platform, which became the Nazi bar.

Major social networks don't do this, but they do actively boost things that create engagement, which is something right-wingers are very good at manufacturing. They use sockpuppet accounts to do that. This means that the underlying amount of toxicity on the Internet is not fixed - i.e. these forums not toxic purely because everyone else kicked them out and concentrated the toxicity, and we can't just disperse the toxicity. Dispersing the toxicity creates more toxicity.

Also, the forums you remember from decades ago were likely way more moderated than you remember, and probably run by people powertripping as hard as Elon Musk or Spez. The difference was that you could just leave without consequence and never come back. You don't have that luxury with Facebook or Twitter.

To be clear, sites like Twitter actively went out of their way NOT to ban people for espousing far right talking points. Infamously there's the story about how auto-moderation would have resulted in the ban of a number of major profiles including GOP politicians and they had to give special treatment to Donald Trump while he was in office because he blatantly violated the terms of service all the time. Arguably more leftist accounts were banned than right-wing (if you exclude bans for active harassment like calling people slurs) but this is because leftists are generally outside the political spectrum so far right accounts tend to not be compared to leftists but to liberals, who of course tend to be more within the bounds of the terms of service.

The Nazi Bar is easily observable in real time with Elon Musk's Xitter. Elon Musk unbanned a number of far right accounts while actively engaging with a number of far right influencers. Additionally bans for slurs and targeted harassment have gone down. In Germany the only way to report an account is via a special flow that tries to implement the requirements of the NetzDG law (with malicious compliance in my opinion) and it's an open secret that ever since the layoffs any NetzDG reports sent via this system now get rejected by default whereas any sent by physical mail get approved by default. A German research project has also demonstrated that German-speaking left-leaning and far left "bubbles" have dwindled since the takeover whereas far right bubbles have gone into overdrive.

All German-speaking tweets (xeets?) I've seen from leftist or moderately popular left-leaning accounts are now flooded with replies from right-wing trolls (or worse) with blue checkmarks, often posting things that are clearly illegal speech under German law (e.g. glorifying criminal violence or directly insulting people to a criminal degree) but are not taken down even when reported. To be clear: this is illegal behavior on the part of X and will eventually result in them being fined. Musk just doesn't seem to care as presumably the fine won't be any more ruinous than what the company already owes.

You can however leave Twitter without consequence. Major influences, brands and others have already done so any many "normies" have stopped going because they experience the same toxicity and look elsewhere. Twitter hasn't been that large to begin with, certainly not on par with Facebook. Twitter's success came from it being the place where celebrities and journalists and influencers can be interacted with directly and you'd get a glimpse into the mind of your favorite famous person or be able to see witness reports of major tragedies first-hand (which of course became increasingly attractive for people trying to spread misinformation for fun or profit).

Why do you assume this very consistent pattern of 'new forum overrun by [the material you've mentioned]' is anything other than a transparent attack on free discourse?

I mean, it's very consistent, isn't it? Everyone knows it happens, and it's a good way to scare people off even thinking about visiting those forums if they think that any day they could go there and have their browser history full of ick.

This is not a problem for free speech organizations, though, since they have the ability to choose which cases they represent.

They can (and do, I'm sure) often weigh the perception of bias in which cases they take on next.

1. We ban people we don't like. They aren't actually Nazis, but we don't like them so we pretend they are.

2. They go to some other place where we don't yet dominate.

3. Now we assert that everyone in that other place is also a Nazi, because they aren't doing the same thing we're doing.

If the Nazi Bar was really a real concept then every left wing political party in the world would be a Bar and therefore everyone voting for them would be a Nazi. Because, recall, they were the National Socialists, and every left wing party has a whole lot of committed socialists.

Luckily for political harmony, other people don't use this type of reasoning to eliminate their enemies so left and right parties can compete fairly for votes. Which is why it needs to be stamped out amongst those who do use it.

The Nazi bar problem is not even hard in concept. If someone is not a Nazi, let them in. If someone is edgy, let them in. If someone is a Nazi, kick them out. Not rocket science. Nazis will not accumulate if done this way.

But people get looser and looser about their definition of Nazis, which ends up being “people I don’t like or who have different politics agendas than me” and pre emptively kick out tons of people in the name of keeping themselves safe

Did you just try to sneak in that blatant lie about the NSDAP being left wing or socialist?

1. They set up a network of forced labor camps.

2. They discriminated against Jews, justifying this by claiming that as rich capitalists they were enemies of socialism.

3. They claimed to represent the working class.

4. They invaded and captured other countries.

5. They were a dictatorship.

6. They were famous for their high levels of propaganda.

7. In their printed materials they stated explicitly "We are socialists", demanded a program of nationalization and stated that all citizens were equal.

8. They imprisoned, exiled or killed their political opponents.

9. Most importantly for this thread, they aggressively censored their opponents and directly controlled the media.

You can't tell what the answer is, because every point is correct for both of them. The differences were much smaller than their similarities.

This matters because it leads to people using NSDAP/USSR ideological tactics like censorship of their political opponents, whilst claiming to be fighting the very same.

This obvious comparison has been suppressed by systematic and vicious attacks on anyone who points it out for a very long time, so I doubt this post will get good reactions and unfortunately HN isn't a good forum for pointing this out because it tends to blame people for the reactions of others regardless of how polite or intellectually curious they may actually be, giving a kind of hecklers veto to discussions. But the confusion here leads to people repeating the mistakes of the past and trying to fight fire with fire, so it's really important to point out. That's why Germany is now punishing an American author for using a swastika in his criticism of politicians: the whole point of studying history is to be able to say "wait, that behaviour looks like something we've seen before" and yet the people doing that are now being attacked as Nazis themselves. This upside-down sort of behaviour is inevitable for as long as people keep insisting on upside-down interpretations of history. You can't claim to be fighting Nazi-ism whilst simultaneously using their tactics!

1. Equating the Holocaust and the gulag system is not just idiotic but outright malicious. The Holocaust was not "a network of forced labor camps". The Nazis had extermination camps. Many also died on the trains to the death camps. They also massacred people directly. The goal of WW2 was to depopulate Eastern Europe and establish "living space" much like the Westward expansion of the early US.

2. The Nazis believed that Jews were migratory parasites lacking any allegiance to a state, draining the host country for resources before moving on to the next country. It equated this with "international bankers" who likewise had no loyalties. The anti-capitalism was rooted in antisemitism, not the other way around. The talk about bankers was what we would now call a dogwhistle.

3. The DAP (later NSDAP) was the only nationalist party that tried to appeal to the working class because it represented the largest voting block. Their politics were however always defined by ethno-nationalism ("völkisch" nationalism to be precise) and antisemitism. The other nationalist parties generally favored a return to the monarchy.

4. That describes most military conflicts in history. However Germany did not want to capture Eastern Europe, it wanted to depopulate it. While the Western Front was largely about revanchism, the Eastern Front was entirely about creating "living space". The Soviet Union did engage in imperalism (although Lenin would disagree based on semantics he invented) but it was more interested in creating distinct Soviet republics and most of its territorial expansion happened in WW2.

5. While the USSR was not what I would call a functioning democracy (and even less so than the USA), even Stalin did not have the same level of power as Hitler. The Bolsheviks embraced bureaucracy and strongly believed in the rule by committees. Given the internal power plays within the party, it's fair to describe Stalin as dictatorial in practice though. However the cult of personality around him was mostly built up after the fact and against his wishes and didn't transfer to his successors like in the DPRK.

6. So was the US? We think of these two as examples of massive propaganda because they were created when mass media became available and we have an outside perspective on their propaganda. The Nazis were however way ahead of the Soviets during their time and the US didn't go to quite the same lengths even before the end of the Cold War.

7. The DAP was explicitly anti-Marxist and embraced what Marxists call "class collaborationism" (as opposed to Marxist class struggle): the idea that despite the divisions, all Germans belong to one people ("Volk", defined by "blood and soil") and differences must be set aside to protect this. When the DAP was renamed, the "socialist" was deliberately chosen to appeal to the working class but the party strongly considered alternative labels to distance itself from Marxism. Any actual anti-capitalist tendencies that survived the Great Depression were eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives when a few holdouts like Strasser were killed to align the party closer with Hitler's vision. The Nazi government also generally did not "nationalise" businesses (not more than other capitalist countries at least), it disowned Jewish people and those deemed enemies of the state. Often these businesses were then sold for very low prices to existing companies. During the war, some companies were also offered cheap access to slave labor in order to aid the war effort. The famous Autobahn and other "accomplishments" of the Nazis were built by companies. I've actually heard people jokingly credit the Nazis for making the idea of "public-private partnerships" popular.

8. If you have to put it so vaguely, you might as well apply that to many other countries including the modern US. I don't think this is a useful framing even if I think that some of the things you're lumping into this both countries did worse than others.

9. Again, you're describing authoritarianism and trying to turn this into a gotcha. Arguably the Nazis had controlled their media less than the Soviets because they would just literally kill or imprison people whereas the Soviets had to create mock trials and torture them until they provided plausible confessions.

I won't even address the rest of your post because it's completely unrelated to your claim. Remember: your claim is that the NSDAP was a left-wing socialist organization and that by implication the Nazi government was socialist and therefore left-wing. You have provided no evidence of that. At best you've demonstrated that the USSR was similarly authoritarian and in many ways did not adhere to its supposedly socialist ideology in practice. That is the opposite of what you claimed to intend to demonstrate.

The NSDAP was far right. The vast majority of political and historical scholars agree on this. It was also decidedly not socialist. By the 1930s it also was no longer anti-capitalist in any meaningful way (again: working class populism isn't socialism, otherwise Tucker Carlson would be a socialist).

By focusing solely on the USSR and the NSDAP you're also ignoring countries like Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain and the Second Portuguese Republic. These states were as much alike as they were different but if you pay enough attention you might find a better pattern than "socialism is when authoritarianism".

The USSR was authoritarian. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they disbanded the workers councils (which btw is what "soviet" means, ironically) and trade unions because the Bolsheviks thought that Russia was too agricultural to be capable of having a true communist revolution and needed the party intelligentsia to figure out how to apply communism for the people. Lenin actually disagreed with Marx on many things, which is why the school of thought based on his writing is known as Marxism-Leninism, not simply Marxism. Specifically Lenin's followers generally think that Marx only described the end goal and Lenin described how to get there. Demonstrably, he did not get there, however. It's worth pointing out that even the USSR and its like agreed on this, which is why they referred to their states as "real existing socialism" (to contrast their systems with "utopian socialism", i.e. what they initially stated would be the end goal but eventually argued was impossible to achieve).

I understand that the American right and its many copycat right-wing movements across the Global North often think "actually the NSDAP was the national SOCIALIST party and it was left-wing" is a nice and easy way to smear anyone left of Reagan but what I want you to understand is that this is not only untrue but also severely misunderstands the extent of the suffering the Nazis inflicted and wanted to inflict. "What if the Nazis had won" makes for entertaining television but in reality it would have meant the systematic death of thousands of millions of people.

The Nazis did not win an election. They did not overthrow the government. They were lifted into power by the Christliche Mitte, a center-right Christian conservative party, because the right saw them as the best weapon against the rise of socialism and the (at that point) imagined threat of a communist revolution[0]. When leftists today talk about "enabling Nazis", this is what they're concerned about. All of Germany did not need to be Nazis for Germany to become Nazi Germany. It didn't even take a majority of voters, let alone a majority of the population[2]. It only took a large enough group and an even larger group of right-wing "moderates" that felt comfortable enough with them to hand them the wheel.

The USSR on the other hand was the result of a revolution. Unlike what the USSR said, this wasn't a revolution of the Bolsheviks although the Bolsheviks had the same enemy: the czar. But the Bolsheviks were the strongest and best organize left when the dust settled and they took the opportunity, first by integrating leftist movements, then by abolishing them, eventually by destroying them. Instead of giving power to the people they said they themselves were the people and they gave all the power to themselves. Instead of ruling bottom-up by delegation they built a bureaucracy and an intricate tapestry of elections and representation.

If you want to understand socialism, you're better off reading Bakunin than Lenin, Bookchin than Stalin, Graeber than Mao. I've commented elsewhere previously in another discussion about real world socialist projects that actually deserve the label rather than using it as statements of aspiration at best or for blunt populism at worst. But they all have in common that they don't start from authoritarianism because authoritarianism always poisons everything. It's difficult to find this information if you don't look for it because we exist in a culture shaped by anti-communist hysteria and Bolshevist propaganda both agreeing on using the labels of communism and socialism exclusively for flavors of authoritarianism. But learning always takes a little effort if you want to do it right.

[0] I'm saying "at that point" because there were genuine attempts to establish forms of communism in the chaos after World War 1, including a number of groups that were aligned with the Bolshevists. There was actually a lot of infighting in the German left over whether to support the Bolshevists or not that largely boiled down to "but they're doing communism wrong" versus "but they're the only ones successfully doing a revolution right now". Most of them died[1] either in battles with the monarchist Freikorps (which were also the breeding ground for the (NS)DAP btw), during violent clashes with other left-wing groups, or at the hands of the Nazis, either prior to their rise of power or thereafter.

[1] It's worth pointing out that despite the Weimar Republic having a central government, many judges would deem defendents not guilty of murder or assault when the act was done "out of love for the country", which specifically meant the monarchy. This largely gave the Freikorps and nationalist groups free reign whereas socialists would be sentenced if they did the same.

[2] The Nazis weren't very popular in Germany when Hitler came to power. The popularity came from the power and even then it was largely artificial. The reason you see cheering crowds in historical documentaries is because those were the scenes the Nazis wanted you to see. You only saw a fraction of the people but it was implied (or outright said) that "the silent majority" was on your side if you agreed with the Nazis. Once they were sufficiently entrenched in power, joining the Party was just an easier way to do networking for your business or your career. You'd do the salute somewhat ironically and both of you would be in on the joke of it, but eventually it stopped being funny but you still did it. Then you had to do it.

That's a lot of words so I probably can't reply to them all, but I'd start by observing that the fact it's so complex to dispute these points indicates it can't possibly be so clear cut, can it?

For example in point 1, I didn't mention the Holocaust. These points were worded carefully. The Nazis did run extermination camps, and they also ran a network of forced labor camps. You yourself mention the use of slave labour later in your reply. This point is not specific to the USSR.

In point 3, you seem to be agreeing. The NSDAP advertised itself as being on the side of the working class, as socialists (at that time) always did. They even selected their name for that reason. Their politics were defined that way to the public.

In point 7, again, you're not arguing with the point as written. They did indeed both do these things. But if you want to widen the context, think about how tiny these differences are you're highlighting! They said they'd nationalize industries, but then they only did it to their enemies. The ones who became subservient to the state voluntarily were allowed to notionally remain "private". This is a wafer thin distinction.

I've seen attempts to debunk or fact check this idea before, and they all look the same. They boil down to "The Nazis said they were socialist, but then they didn't do the things they promised so they weren't really!" which is a ridiculously weak rebuttal. Of course they didn't do the things they said they'd do, of course they didn't live up to their espoused principles. Socialists never do! That's why there was a whole cold war to try and stop them spreading.

The fact that they didn't really care about the workers or any of the other pretty ideas they marketed, does therefore not mean they were on the right.

The difficulty I have with that idea is that logically "far right" means the opposite of the far left. The USSR was far left, I'm sure we both agree. The opposite of the USSR would have been the USA (strong free speech protections, no forced labor camps, etc). Which was the Reich closer to - USSR or the USA? It seems obvious it was the USSR. It therefore cannot be the opposite of that.

It's the physical analouge to how Twitter can still be the most used social media website despite also having years of accusations about every kind of bad content under the sun. So if a group is large enough, I wouldn't be worried about that kind of inflitration.