I think the thing that will cool off is the generation of outrage, and heated (note the term), emotional discourse.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
One of the upsides for me during this time of social unrest is that I have been able to put my Sociology degree to major use during discussions.
One of the reasons touting that statistic might get an auto-remove is because it is in itself deceptive, or at least can be in the inferences many people make from it.
Seeing that statistic might make people think that black people are inherently violent, that there is something about black people that make them commit more homicides. the actual reason that many people do not lift from seeing that statistic on its own, is that homicides and violence are directly linked to poverty.
Then, someone who may be uneducated on the matter might believe that black people are simply both poor and violent, which would completely discount generations of systemic oppression targeted toward minorities and black people specifically which have directly led to their higher poverty rates.
I don't have a particular epistemic position one way or the other, but I'll suggest the alternate hypothesis that the text "experiment about censorship on reddit" might have had more to do with the lack of removal than it being posted on a minor subreddit.
It really is a crass and inflammatory statement, though. The 13% number may be supported by data, but the actual meaning and phrasing of the statement is actually highly opinionated.
First, it's a fact that black Americans are over-policed and over-prosecuted compared to white Americans. It is reasonable to believe that the conviction rates are skewed.
Second, there is the nasty business of the phrasing "...responsible for...". It is a reasonable perspective to have that if black Americans engage in more violence, it is because they have been subjected to more violence and deprived of opportunity. And that, ultimately, is in many cases, the responsibility of white Americans.
And then, sometimes people just commit murder, regardless of race.
Without the context of a fully-rendered explicit argument, the implied argument in that statement seems to be one of some kind of innate racial disposition. Which people should rightly reject, if not censor. As noted, the "I'm simply running a test" comment was not censored. So perhaps it isn't the data point that is censored, but the implied argument that you seem to be making.
I understand that it can be frustrating to have a 'fact' censored, especially if your intent is to have a productive discussion about a difficult topic. However, as laid out above, that 'fact' is not as simple as your test makes it out to be. It is a statement derived from statistical data that was collected by a government agency. If you cited it as such, and left out the language connecting moral responsibility with a racial group, it would be a more truthful and objective representation of fact, and might not be censored the same way. The test seems to loosely support this, and actually indicates the censorship being applied on reddit is actually quite effective.
Edit: On a related note, it is interesting how guarded I feel even replying to something like this. It's as if I want not to even be part of such a conversation publicly for fear of algorithmic misinterpretation of my meaning. I assume others feel this way, too, based on the OP. That's not the world any of us want to live in. It's not so much I mind publicly published information being collected and analyzed, but that I fear it being utilized in some grand corporate conspiracy. Perhaps we should legislate not against information collection and analysis, but antisocial behavior analysis conspiracies.
> It is a reasonable perspective to have that if black Americans engage in more violence, it is because they have been subjected to more violence and deprived of opportunity. And that, ultimately, is in many cases, the responsibility of white Americans.
I disagree that this is a reasonable perspective at all. Adult people are wholy responsible for their actions. This fundemental fact underpins our whole society.
I would say that this statistic is primarily used to explain disproportionate encounters with (and subsequently death at the hands of) police. It's important to note that black people are also massively overrepresented as victims of violent crime. This suggests that black communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed. This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism. This argument is not very popular, so it seems to get censored.
>Adult people are wholy responsible for their actions. This fundemental fact underpins our whole society.
You say that is solely fault of the individual, but then say that it "suggests that communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed". So, if it is the fault of each black individual, as you claim is the underpinning of society, why are black communities being more policed?
>This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism.
Being this the case, wherein lies the issue: the black community or the police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities? Keep in mind that only one of the two is in fact an institution funded by the public that undergoes training.
The biggest issue with these kinds of arguments is that it does not take in consideration that black communities are marginalized and target of harassment. This is institutionalized in the sense that the training the harassing people receive teaches them to harass and keeps telling them that they will get killed otherwise. This is not present only in the police, but in other facets of society as well. Look at how many videos of black americans being followed by security in malls and store there are on social media. This shows a pattern that keeps happening, and in unfortunately in many situations escalate to injury or death.
> So, if it is the fault of each black individual, as you claim is the underpinning of society, why are black communities being more policed?
Because effective policing means distributing police resources according to demand?
> police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities?
It seems perfectly reasonable to be more fearful when going into a more dangerous area. I don't see any evidence that police are somehow less aggressive or fearful when going into areas dominated by violent gangs with other skin colours. Can you point to some official training doctrine that tells police to be fearful of black people? I'm quite sure that has been illegal for a long time.
Yes, we do hold people individually responsible because it is necessary. We can't forgive crime because a nuanced understanding of recent history and racism. That is a value we hold, but there is nothing "factual" about it, so this is an example of diluting the word "fact" to mean other things.
Slavery was real. Racism was and is real. Inter-generational effects from these forces are real. In all racial groups, lack of opportunity with the legal economy increases engagement with illegal economies. Do you agree?
The statistic is used to explain and place blame upon black Americans for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and saying that it merely "explains" tries to conceal the opinionated nature of that statement with an aura of objectivity.
It is very convenient and clean to ignore recent history and talk about individual responsibility, while taking no individual responsibility for the unequal treatment of blacks that you support with such arguments. By simply citing that statistic while failing entirely to address the obvious and very recent (very present) endemic racism and unequal treatment of black Americans, and placing the blame squarely on their collective shoulders, the only logical conclusion can be that there is something innate about people of that race that leads them to violence, which is objectionable, racist, and has no place in reasonable discourse. There is nothing "good faith" about such an argument.
You will go so far to say that black communities are more violent, but you shy away from saying why you think that is. You will cite a statistic that makes them sound guilty without acknowledging the factors that lead to it being true.
"Soldiers are murderers. 95% of soldiers involved in WWII killed people." Generally, this is true. But we choose not to view it that way.
A statement is not a statistic. A statement includes a statistic. A statement is an analysis, and the way you choose to analyze some data has ethical implications.
> That is a value we hold, but there is nothing "factual" about it, so this is an example of diluting the word "fact" to mean other things.
This is true - this is a value, not a fact. It is a value however that underpins our legal system and therefore our society. The idea that we assign moral agency and total responsbility for action to capable adult individuals who take those actions.
> The statistic is used to explain and place blame upon black Americans for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement
That's not what any resonalbe interpretation of what I wrote reads. To elaborate, we can assume that 1/E police encouters (E) will result in a death. Much like we can assume 1/P medical procedures (P) will result in a death. People are people and everyone makes mistakes at work. When your work deals with peoples lives those mistakes cost them. I don't see a way to avoid E or P existing. If we are trying to determine if E is biased against black people, we can see if E is significantly different between races. Turns out it's not. In fact You are slightly more likely to be killed as a white person in a police encouter than as a black person.
It's an entirely separate issue from racism if we are suggesting that E (or P) is too low. But the data clearly demonstrates it's not racially biased.
Now the only remaining question is why black people are significantly more likely to experience a police encouter than white people. What we find is that black people tend to live in more criminal and therefore more heavily policed areas than white people. Do you think that police should not pay more attention to more criminal neighbourhoods? Where is the racism?
> You will go so far to say that black communities are more violent, but you shy away from saying why you think that is. You will cite a statistic that makes them sound guilty without acknowledging the factors that lead to it being true.
I don't specualte as to why because I don't know and I assume the answer is very complicated. I prefer to pay attention to folks like Thomas Sowell who have dedicated their careers to answering these questions. I found a good starting point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5csE8q9mho
The statistic is automatically (as in, by a robot, not by a person) removed. I only ever noticed because I made a long comment arguing against the racist use of the statistic (where I linked the table the statistic is from, etc.). However, I'm simply against statistics being banned.
I didn't bother with all the extra stuff in my experiment, because it's not important for testing the robot which removes the comments immediately and automatically.
But it wasn't banned in one example where the statistic was cited. Aside from the subreddit, the only difference was the additional context that "this is a test of censorship".
I will note, however, that your original comment has now been flagged and is invisible, cooling this whole discussion. While I object to the statistic and think that censorship of statements including that statistic may actually be productive in some cases, I think that this conversation has the potential to be productive, and I regret that the meta-conversation about censorship is not possible.
Something about the phrasing of the comment has stopped it from being removed. It was silly of me to let my wish of not offending people get in the way of scientific investigation. Still, I think it is not because of the polite preface that the comment has not been removed, and I will test it by including the polite preface to the comment which was removed.
>Hello, please don't mind this comment, I'm simply running an experiment about censorship on reddit.
This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[7]
So, it is clear that there is something about the contents of this segment which causes comments to be automatically removed (at the very least, on /r/askreddit) "This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?". I'm guessing that it's as simple as the fact that I used the less commonly used 13.4% in the non-censored comment, whereas I used the more commonly used 13% in the censored comment.
I'll now run some experiments to narrow down what exactly are the conditions for removal. Results will be placed on https://pastebin.com/Z6G0B7kA. I'll do a write up later, when I've fully understood the extent of the censorship.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?