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When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let the

by cjslep 6y ago

When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer. For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps. It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary. However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched. It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up. We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.

rickbutton 6y ago
100%. If you are still in this thread defending the ability for white supremacists to spew racism and hate on these platforms, then that means that you wish for them to continue relaying their awful message, in which case you are a white supremacist by definition. These awful people do not "add to the discourse" in a meaningful way. Their insane ideas should not be entertained.
- alexryan 6y ago
  I suspect that many genuinely kind hearted people think they are doing the right thing by silencing the speech of those whom they find repulsive but have never stopped to ask themselves “Why are the oligarchs on my side?” Project Dragonfly is alive and well and unfolding before our very eyes. This is how democracy dies.
  - ausbah 6y ago
    There are plenty of mainstream figures that directly or indirectly support the desires of the far right. They pay not be as explicit as the KKK or Nazis, but definitely have real influence.
    - fapjacks 6y ago
      Got any examples this that don't conflate conservativism with nazism or white supremacy?
  - whatthesmack 6y ago
    I wish I could upvote this more. Many folks here fancy themselves as intellectual people, yet they do backflips in logic to justify silencing voices they find repugnant or inconvenient. The concept of free speech simply cannot have exceptions, conditions, or predications. It’s only a marketplace of ideas if the loud or powerful voices aren’t silencing and banning voices that might not be as popular. Indeed, this is how democracy dies.
- iratewizard 6y ago
  Free speech so long as you agree with what they're saying.
  - api 6y ago
    Nobody's preventing anyone from speaking. They're just refusing to allow them to use their private property to broadcast it. There are loads of web sites and even entire alternative social networks where you can find as much of this stuff as you want. BTW: I get the impression that sites like Reddit and YouTube, rather than being quick to ban, have given these groups and individual personalities a pass for quite some time. Alex Jones had to start harassing the victims of school shootings to get banned. I doubt someone as well known as him would last that long. If anything these platforms keep these people on as long as they can because ad dollars and only ban them when the advertisers revolt.
steveeq1 6y ago
Ok, what if this person were a thug and he advocates for a "thug life" (as an arbitrary example, a gangsta rapper)? And let's say he committed a lot of crime and physical harm to other people? Would you issue the same behavior towards him? Would you be very vocal about it?
- ChefboyOG 6y ago
  This example doesn't feel very "arbitrary."
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  What is your theory, that no one has ever declined to do business with a rapper? You might want to do some fact checking on that.
  - steveeq1 6y ago
    "No one has ever"? I doubt "ever", but the BLM crowd rarely does.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  On the surface, this seems like a silly example - it doesn't compare in practice. However, if you honestly, in good faith, think that it does, you absolutely should make an effort to form that argument.
  - BBkid 6y ago
    I believe that what he is trying to say is that, even though the lyrics are about killing people, selling drugs and so, nobody bans their music and they have the right to express themselves.
    - 6y ago
happytoexplain 6y ago
Agreed. There is much to reasonably debate about where lines are drawn in regards to which private platforms are de facto public squares, if any, and which are not; and what speech is a reasonable cause for being banned from such a platform, and what speech is not. But the fact that there is such a significant amount of hateful, violence-loving speech, and that it is continuously growing, simply overshadows the topic. I'll happily debate those subtleties all day, once we're not driving cars into groups of each other over identity politics, accusing people who are trying to vote of fraud while intimidating them with guns in person, threatening each other with civil war, gleefully mocking victims of politically motivated violence, and, most of all, once we no longer have a US president who encourages all of that hatred.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  This is what I wish was more studied. I feel like social media are intentionally designed to cause people to share violent and toxic speech. I hangout on discord in few big servers and I rarely encounter anything outright racist. Might just be because they are all tech related or maybe a no politics rule change the atmosphere if enforced ruthlessly. There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically. I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".
lappet 6y ago
Any thoughts on why the Klan hasn't yet been banned outright?
- gojomo 6y ago
  In the USA, the reason is the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Both in text & traditional interpretation, that gives them the right to speak & assemble – but not do other non-communicative actions that would be criminal no matter the motivations.
  - lappet 6y ago
    Wasn't the Klan responsible for hate-mongering and terrorist activities in the past?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 6y ago
      The actual terroristic activities are illegal, and Klan members have been prosecuted (and successfully sued) for them. "Hate-mongering" isn't illegal in the US.
      - lappet 6y ago
        So Al Qaeda etc would be legal in the US?
        tptacek 6y ago
        No? Militant Islamism, however, is.
      - dogma1138 6y ago
        If the Klan would’ve been classified as a terrorist organization they would be illegal they haven’t. The Nation of Islam is also classified as a hate group by the SPLC however they aren’t banned under the same laws that protect the KKK. NOI members just like the KKK have been prosecuted in the past for many things, however outside of very limited circumstances there isn’t such thing as guilt by association in the US justice system.
qqn 6y ago
"Just because they're the problem doesn't mean we aren't." https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-problem https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-problem
lliamander 6y ago
> However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched. Sounds like your father was an honorable man. Honest question: when does pushing the fringe go too far? Is it appropriate for banks to deny their business? Grocery stores?
- save_ferris 6y ago
  Most banks and grocery stores are private businesses and being openly racist isn’t a protected class, so it should be up to them, no?
  - lliamander 6y ago
    I wasn't asking a question on the legal theory, but a clarification on the OP's own statement that one should be "careful with this pushing of the fringe", which is presumably a moral or pragmatic one.
mnm1 6y ago
They definitely shouldn't be here or anywhere. This is the right approach. Government power is not the only power and in contemporary times, not even the greatest power in most affairs. Megacorps have huge amounts of power. Often they use it to hurt people. I can't imagine a single american who hasn't been scammed by some megacorp like comcast, wells fargo, verizon, etc. But, sometimes their incentives align with those of the society at large. We should not hold them back by using the slippery slope fallacy. Most of the time, their incentives don't align with society's, so we should be thankful when these unregulated entities actually help society, even though that is never their goal. Yes, ideally this would be handled by government in some way, but our government is too inept to handle anything these days, including reigning in the power of these megacorps.
saeranv 6y ago
Well said. I especially appreciate the distinction you're making between balancing liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. This is the kind of difficult nuance that I rarely see in these discussions. One one side there's the free speech absolutists, whose arguments tend to ignore the fact that unmoderated propaganda, and hate speech tends to be more addictive, and spread ignorance faster then fact-checking can fix it. The consequences of this sort of callous attitude are literally genocide[1]. On the other hand, there's the 'cancel-culture mobs' (for lack of a better term) which are now censoring regular speech that disagrees, or appears to disagrees, or isn't sufficiently subservient to their opinions. Just yesterday I was sadly reading this depressing thread where Yann LeCun was run off twitter[2] for explaining how bias (in the social science sense) can be traced back to various steps in the ML pipeline (in this case, mainly a feature of the dataset itself, but also the choice of errors, bias vs variance, etc). The inability to admit nuance is the only thing I can think both these groups share, and maybe what needs to be emphasized more. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... [2] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016
skinkestek 6y ago
> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN: tptacek shared some interesting research he'd done a couple of hours ago and it might be of interest to everyone here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929
- iron0013 6y ago
  He made a claim, but he didn’t actually share any of his research or data.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    I'm fairly certain he can stand for it. Also, tptacek is fairly far to the left it seems (in an American context) so it actually surprised me quite a bit that he'd write that. Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we?
    - erichocean 6y ago
      > Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we? HN is in a weird place today, very similar to where the Slate Star Codex guy was a few years ago. That is, racist Whites seem to feel safe commenting here (with appropriate dog whistles and what not), but you wonder how long that can last… In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog [0] when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed. I expect the same to happen with HN. dang does a good job keeping people on-message politically (and I'm sure tptacek did as well), but being "racist-adjacent"—which HN absolutely is [1]—isn't a long-term viable position. Someday soon I expect the racist-adjacent user-banning to kick into high gear on HN (like SSC did) but it will be too little, too late. Eventually, HN will inevitably shut down—and it might be sooner than any of us think. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com/ [1] This is from an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683033
contrapunter 6y ago
Important to recognise that Stefan Molyneux is not far-right, whether or not the far-right are encouraged by his YT channel deletion. I would classify him as an atheist/libertarian.
- iron0013 6y ago
  That’s how you personally might classify him, but many would disagree with you. To my eye, for one, it seems quite obvious that Molyneux is a far-right figure.
  - contrapunter 6y ago
    Nah; I've listened to a number of his shows. He's a popular political commentator who is anti-communist/leftwing -- that's why they banned him.
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      You should check out some of the Stefan Molyneux quotes the SPLC has gathered: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/stefan-molyneux https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi... An example: > "Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." These all have associated YouTube video links - which are now taken down it seems.
      - Ghjklov 6y ago
        If we can't check the videos, how do we confirm the quotes were really said and in what context? Racists: 1 Censorship: 0
        AlexandrB 6y ago
        I sense an implied “/s” in your post. But just in case, there are in-depth critiques that include significant portions of Molyneux’s videos still up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA Certainly enough to get a sense for Molyneux’s ideology.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sinker 6y ago
So long as YouTube issues bans to users that are as egregiously racist as klan members I see no problem. I don't know any of these people, but if they are undeniably white supremacists, then it's a hard sell to dispute this individual action. But another argument lies in the policy of bans for certain types of speech, and that's the argument that's more pertinent. If we accept that YouTube can ban users for hate speech, then we also accept that YouTube is the arbiter of what constitutes hate speech. The question at hand is if we can deem YouTube a fair judge.
- AgentME 6y ago
  If YouTube shows itself as an unfair judge, then let's criticize them for that when it happens. Otherwise, having a judge is much better than having no judge at all.
  - sinker 6y ago
    That's the current situation, and maybe it's worked well so far (I don't create content on YouTube). What appears necessary or at the very least helpful, is to have a very clear terms of service that outlines exactly what is unacceptable so these situations can be avoided in the first place. One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect? Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban? A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views. These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley). EDIT: Stefan, not Peter Molyneux.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      > A few comments say Peter Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views. It's Stefan not Peter. But he is very "specifically racist". He believes that arabic people are too dumb for democracy. Among a litany of other terrible statements.
roenxi 6y ago
> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe"... The "far-right" is becoming a broad term in media usage and will end up in the same place as "racist" where it is a category that catches the views of a good 40% of people. It isn't obvious that wins for the far right is a bad thing. Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Klan being pushed off Youtube, but Molyneux is not a member of the Klan.
- stuaxo 6y ago
  While there are probably examples of that, I find it unlikely that the general use of the "far right" would capture 40% of people very unlikely.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pensatoio 6y ago
    There are so many examples it’s kind of ridiculous. Jordan Peterson, for example, who isn’t even remotely right. What I mean to say, is that it’s become common for left-leaning media to describe perfectly moderate right positions as “far-right” and “alt-right,” to the point where those terms mean almost nothing to someone who isn’t politically savvy to distinguish.
    - Covzire 6y ago
      Calling someone "far right" or "alt right" are effectively dog whistles at this point, used to notify a member of the Democrat party that their standing in the community and probably their income is at serious risk if they do anything to speak positively about the person.
    - tarsinge 6y ago
      How Jordan Peterson isn’t even remotely on the right apart from him saying it? Any action leaning on the left for him has some evil Marxist influence for him. Also his theories on “Masculinity“ have nothing to do with classical left and right and are de-facto alt-right.
syshum 6y ago
I agree with this post for the most part, however the problem is they are not simply banning "the klan", nor it is "paradox of tolerance" as it seems we have moves beyond tolerance to acceptance. The authoritarian left is promoting segregation, promoting speech codes, and also labeling any disagreement with their socialist / communist economic policies as "racist" or "nazi" All of that said, before I can progress further I would love to know what you believe the "far right" is, because that is not a defined term anymore, every day conservative values and opinions (things like we should have basic immigration control, or should not have government run health care) are now labeled as "far right" and "racist" so it seems to we need a defining of the terms so I can know what you consider to be a "far right" position
smitty1e 6y ago
I've never seen them IRL. I wonder how prevalent the Klan actually is.
- fapjacks 6y ago
  And herein lies the problem: Having pushed the purveyors of "unacceptable ideology" (whatever that may be, decided by whomever) into the black market, we now have made confronting it (by letting our value judgments stand to reason, which they will, if we let them) much more difficult. People behave as though they are completely powerless to stop bad thoughts from following the utterance of particular words in a particular order, which to me is as fundamentally insane as the idea that you can stop murder by simply banning murder, or that you can stop people from using drugs by simply banning drugs. The central problem is that people are lazy as hell. The answer to this problem and indeed, most problems we face in society, is building and maintaining stronger communities, and encouraging critical thought and an educated and participatory citizenry. But this is incredibly hard, and is incompatible with most forms of grift which people have set up to enrich themselves. In the end, however, this is really a description of all of human history. It will always be the case that building and maintaining a "good" society is incredibly hard work, which most people reflexively don't want to do (in the same way that most people don't want to do the dishes, or take the shopping cart back to the shopping cart corral at the grocery store).
moralestapia 6y ago
>It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. Wait what? I would love to hear your take on this then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  I’m pretty sure we are all aware that anti-discrimination laws exist and have in the US for half a century. Political opinions don’t make for protected classes.
hnick 6y ago
In a small town, everyone knows everyone, so it's easier to exclude them if you want to. It's a lot harder online when you don't know people, they show up unannounced, they hide their true intent behind plausible deniability and dog whistles, and they just come back with another account when they get sprung. Inoculation is a good idea. I think this blog post sheds some light on how targeted, intentional, and childish, many of the tactics are and being able to notice them is important. They very much rely on people letting them scatter their pieces all over the web as you say. https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-white-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84 https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-an...

by cjslep 6y ago

rickbutton 6y ago

100%. If you are still in this thread defending the ability for white supremacists to spew racism and hate on these platforms, then that means that you wish for them to continue relaying their awful message, in which case you are a white supremacist by definition. These awful people do not "add to the discourse" in a meaningful way. Their insane ideas should not be entertained.

alexryan 6y ago
I suspect that many genuinely kind hearted people think they are doing the right thing by silencing the speech of those whom they find repulsive but have never stopped to ask themselves “Why are the oligarchs on my side?” Project Dragonfly is alive and well and unfolding before our very eyes. This is how democracy dies.
- ausbah 6y ago
  There are plenty of mainstream figures that directly or indirectly support the desires of the far right. They pay not be as explicit as the KKK or Nazis, but definitely have real influence.
  - fapjacks 6y ago
    Got any examples this that don't conflate conservativism with nazism or white supremacy?
- whatthesmack 6y ago
  I wish I could upvote this more. Many folks here fancy themselves as intellectual people, yet they do backflips in logic to justify silencing voices they find repugnant or inconvenient. The concept of free speech simply cannot have exceptions, conditions, or predications. It’s only a marketplace of ideas if the loud or powerful voices aren’t silencing and banning voices that might not be as popular. Indeed, this is how democracy dies.
iratewizard 6y ago
Free speech so long as you agree with what they're saying.
- api 6y ago
  Nobody's preventing anyone from speaking. They're just refusing to allow them to use their private property to broadcast it. There are loads of web sites and even entire alternative social networks where you can find as much of this stuff as you want. BTW: I get the impression that sites like Reddit and YouTube, rather than being quick to ban, have given these groups and individual personalities a pass for quite some time. Alex Jones had to start harassing the victims of school shootings to get banned. I doubt someone as well known as him would last that long. If anything these platforms keep these people on as long as they can because ad dollars and only ban them when the advertisers revolt.

steveeq1 6y ago

Ok, what if this person were a thug and he advocates for a "thug life" (as an arbitrary example, a gangsta rapper)? And let's say he committed a lot of crime and physical harm to other people? Would you issue the same behavior towards him? Would you be very vocal about it?

ChefboyOG 6y ago
This example doesn't feel very "arbitrary."
snowwrestler 6y ago
What is your theory, that no one has ever declined to do business with a rapper? You might want to do some fact checking on that.
- steveeq1 6y ago
  "No one has ever"? I doubt "ever", but the BLM crowd rarely does.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
happytoexplain 6y ago
On the surface, this seems like a silly example - it doesn't compare in practice. However, if you honestly, in good faith, think that it does, you absolutely should make an effort to form that argument.
- BBkid 6y ago
  I believe that what he is trying to say is that, even though the lyrics are about killing people, selling drugs and so, nobody bans their music and they have the right to express themselves.
  - 6y ago

happytoexplain 6y ago

Agreed. There is much to reasonably debate about where lines are drawn in regards to which private platforms are de facto public squares, if any, and which are not; and what speech is a reasonable cause for being banned from such a platform, and what speech is not. But the fact that there is such a significant amount of hateful, violence-loving speech, and that it is continuously growing, simply overshadows the topic. I'll happily debate those subtleties all day, once we're not driving cars into groups of each other over identity politics, accusing people who are trying to vote of fraud while intimidating them with guns in person, threatening each other with civil war, gleefully mocking victims of politically motivated violence, and, most of all, once we no longer have a US president who encourages all of that hatred.

searchableguy 6y ago
This is what I wish was more studied. I feel like social media are intentionally designed to cause people to share violent and toxic speech. I hangout on discord in few big servers and I rarely encounter anything outright racist. Might just be because they are all tech related or maybe a no politics rule change the atmosphere if enforced ruthlessly. There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically. I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".

lappet 6y ago

Any thoughts on why the Klan hasn't yet been banned outright?

gojomo 6y ago
In the USA, the reason is the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Both in text & traditional interpretation, that gives them the right to speak & assemble – but not do other non-communicative actions that would be criminal no matter the motivations.
- lappet 6y ago
  Wasn't the Klan responsible for hate-mongering and terrorist activities in the past?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 6y ago
    The actual terroristic activities are illegal, and Klan members have been prosecuted (and successfully sued) for them. "Hate-mongering" isn't illegal in the US.
    - lappet 6y ago
      So Al Qaeda etc would be legal in the US?
      - tptacek 6y ago
        No? Militant Islamism, however, is.
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      If the Klan would’ve been classified as a terrorist organization they would be illegal they haven’t. The Nation of Islam is also classified as a hate group by the SPLC however they aren’t banned under the same laws that protect the KKK. NOI members just like the KKK have been prosecuted in the past for many things, however outside of very limited circumstances there isn’t such thing as guilt by association in the US justice system.

qqn 6y ago

"Just because they're the problem doesn't mean we aren't." https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-problem https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-problem

lliamander 6y ago

> However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched. Sounds like your father was an honorable man. Honest question: when does pushing the fringe go too far? Is it appropriate for banks to deny their business? Grocery stores?

save_ferris 6y ago
Most banks and grocery stores are private businesses and being openly racist isn’t a protected class, so it should be up to them, no?
- lliamander 6y ago
  I wasn't asking a question on the legal theory, but a clarification on the OP's own statement that one should be "careful with this pushing of the fringe", which is presumably a moral or pragmatic one.

mnm1 6y ago

They definitely shouldn't be here or anywhere. This is the right approach. Government power is not the only power and in contemporary times, not even the greatest power in most affairs. Megacorps have huge amounts of power. Often they use it to hurt people. I can't imagine a single american who hasn't been scammed by some megacorp like comcast, wells fargo, verizon, etc. But, sometimes their incentives align with those of the society at large. We should not hold them back by using the slippery slope fallacy. Most of the time, their incentives don't align with society's, so we should be thankful when these unregulated entities actually help society, even though that is never their goal. Yes, ideally this would be handled by government in some way, but our government is too inept to handle anything these days, including reigning in the power of these megacorps.

saeranv 6y ago

Well said. I especially appreciate the distinction you're making between balancing liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. This is the kind of difficult nuance that I rarely see in these discussions. One one side there's the free speech absolutists, whose arguments tend to ignore the fact that unmoderated propaganda, and hate speech tends to be more addictive, and spread ignorance faster then fact-checking can fix it. The consequences of this sort of callous attitude are literally genocide[1]. On the other hand, there's the 'cancel-culture mobs' (for lack of a better term) which are now censoring regular speech that disagrees, or appears to disagrees, or isn't sufficiently subservient to their opinions. Just yesterday I was sadly reading this depressing thread where Yann LeCun was run off twitter[2] for explaining how bias (in the social science sense) can be traced back to various steps in the ML pipeline (in this case, mainly a feature of the dataset itself, but also the choice of errors, bias vs variance, etc). The inability to admit nuance is the only thing I can think both these groups share, and maybe what needs to be emphasized more. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... [2] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016

skinkestek 6y ago

> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN: tptacek shared some interesting research he'd done a couple of hours ago and it might be of interest to everyone here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929

iron0013 6y ago
He made a claim, but he didn’t actually share any of his research or data.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  I'm fairly certain he can stand for it. Also, tptacek is fairly far to the left it seems (in an American context) so it actually surprised me quite a bit that he'd write that. Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we?
  - erichocean 6y ago
    > Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we? HN is in a weird place today, very similar to where the Slate Star Codex guy was a few years ago. That is, racist Whites seem to feel safe commenting here (with appropriate dog whistles and what not), but you wonder how long that can last… In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog [0] when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed. I expect the same to happen with HN. dang does a good job keeping people on-message politically (and I'm sure tptacek did as well), but being "racist-adjacent"—which HN absolutely is [1]—isn't a long-term viable position. Someday soon I expect the racist-adjacent user-banning to kick into high gear on HN (like SSC did) but it will be too little, too late. Eventually, HN will inevitably shut down—and it might be sooner than any of us think. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com/ [1] This is from an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683033

contrapunter 6y ago

Important to recognise that Stefan Molyneux is not far-right, whether or not the far-right are encouraged by his YT channel deletion. I would classify him as an atheist/libertarian.

iron0013 6y ago
That’s how you personally might classify him, but many would disagree with you. To my eye, for one, it seems quite obvious that Molyneux is a far-right figure.
- contrapunter 6y ago
  Nah; I've listened to a number of his shows. He's a popular political commentator who is anti-communist/leftwing -- that's why they banned him.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    You should check out some of the Stefan Molyneux quotes the SPLC has gathered: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/stefan-molyneux https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi... An example: > "Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." These all have associated YouTube video links - which are now taken down it seems.
    - Ghjklov 6y ago
      If we can't check the videos, how do we confirm the quotes were really said and in what context? Racists: 1 Censorship: 0
      - AlexandrB 6y ago
        I sense an implied “/s” in your post. But just in case, there are in-depth critiques that include significant portions of Molyneux’s videos still up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA Certainly enough to get a sense for Molyneux’s ideology.

deleted 6y ago

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sinker 6y ago

So long as YouTube issues bans to users that are as egregiously racist as klan members I see no problem. I don't know any of these people, but if they are undeniably white supremacists, then it's a hard sell to dispute this individual action. But another argument lies in the policy of bans for certain types of speech, and that's the argument that's more pertinent. If we accept that YouTube can ban users for hate speech, then we also accept that YouTube is the arbiter of what constitutes hate speech. The question at hand is if we can deem YouTube a fair judge.

AgentME 6y ago
If YouTube shows itself as an unfair judge, then let's criticize them for that when it happens. Otherwise, having a judge is much better than having no judge at all.
- sinker 6y ago
  That's the current situation, and maybe it's worked well so far (I don't create content on YouTube). What appears necessary or at the very least helpful, is to have a very clear terms of service that outlines exactly what is unacceptable so these situations can be avoided in the first place. One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect? Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban? A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views. These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley). EDIT: Stefan, not Peter Molyneux.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    > A few comments say Peter Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views. It's Stefan not Peter. But he is very "specifically racist". He believes that arabic people are too dumb for democracy. Among a litany of other terrible statements.

roenxi 6y ago

> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe"... The "far-right" is becoming a broad term in media usage and will end up in the same place as "racist" where it is a category that catches the views of a good 40% of people. It isn't obvious that wins for the far right is a bad thing. Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Klan being pushed off Youtube, but Molyneux is not a member of the Klan.

stuaxo 6y ago
While there are probably examples of that, I find it unlikely that the general use of the "far right" would capture 40% of people very unlikely.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pensatoio 6y ago
  There are so many examples it’s kind of ridiculous. Jordan Peterson, for example, who isn’t even remotely right. What I mean to say, is that it’s become common for left-leaning media to describe perfectly moderate right positions as “far-right” and “alt-right,” to the point where those terms mean almost nothing to someone who isn’t politically savvy to distinguish.
  - Covzire 6y ago
    Calling someone "far right" or "alt right" are effectively dog whistles at this point, used to notify a member of the Democrat party that their standing in the community and probably their income is at serious risk if they do anything to speak positively about the person.
  - tarsinge 6y ago
    How Jordan Peterson isn’t even remotely on the right apart from him saying it? Any action leaning on the left for him has some evil Marxist influence for him. Also his theories on “Masculinity“ have nothing to do with classical left and right and are de-facto alt-right.

syshum 6y ago

I agree with this post for the most part, however the problem is they are not simply banning "the klan", nor it is "paradox of tolerance" as it seems we have moves beyond tolerance to acceptance. The authoritarian left is promoting segregation, promoting speech codes, and also labeling any disagreement with their socialist / communist economic policies as "racist" or "nazi" All of that said, before I can progress further I would love to know what you believe the "far right" is, because that is not a defined term anymore, every day conservative values and opinions (things like we should have basic immigration control, or should not have government run health care) are now labeled as "far right" and "racist" so it seems to we need a defining of the terms so I can know what you consider to be a "far right" position

smitty1e 6y ago

I've never seen them IRL. I wonder how prevalent the Klan actually is.

fapjacks 6y ago
And herein lies the problem: Having pushed the purveyors of "unacceptable ideology" (whatever that may be, decided by whomever) into the black market, we now have made confronting it (by letting our value judgments stand to reason, which they will, if we let them) much more difficult. People behave as though they are completely powerless to stop bad thoughts from following the utterance of particular words in a particular order, which to me is as fundamentally insane as the idea that you can stop murder by simply banning murder, or that you can stop people from using drugs by simply banning drugs. The central problem is that people are lazy as hell. The answer to this problem and indeed, most problems we face in society, is building and maintaining stronger communities, and encouraging critical thought and an educated and participatory citizenry. But this is incredibly hard, and is incompatible with most forms of grift which people have set up to enrich themselves. In the end, however, this is really a description of all of human history. It will always be the case that building and maintaining a "good" society is incredibly hard work, which most people reflexively don't want to do (in the same way that most people don't want to do the dishes, or take the shopping cart back to the shopping cart corral at the grocery store).

moralestapia 6y ago

>It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. Wait what? I would love to hear your take on this then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I’m pretty sure we are all aware that anti-discrimination laws exist and have in the US for half a century. Political opinions don’t make for protected classes.

hnick 6y ago

In a small town, everyone knows everyone, so it's easier to exclude them if you want to. It's a lot harder online when you don't know people, they show up unannounced, they hide their true intent behind plausible deniability and dog whistles, and they just come back with another account when they get sprung. Inoculation is a good idea. I think this blog post sheds some light on how targeted, intentional, and childish, many of the tactics are and being able to notice them is important. They very much rely on people letting them scatter their pieces all over the web as you say. https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-white-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84 https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-an...