None of the companies discontinuing relationships with 8chan are monopolies. In some cases they're just the last in their category to finally drop 8chan.
I've always been intrigued by this, do you think that platforms such as YouTube should be considered public infrastructure? And if so for what reasons?
It might not be true in the general case yet, but it's certainly a sentiment I can get behind. Privately-owned toll roads shouldn't be able to ban political opponents - why should the Internet equivalent be different?
The truth is that information does not radicalize people - censorship does. That's why the channers are as radicalized as they are - they've been censored everywhere else. Censor their last remaining outlets and you will increase violence by orders of magnitude.
The truth is that information does not radicalize people - censorship does. That's why the channers are as radicalized as they are - they've been censored everywhere else. Censor their last remaining outlets and you will increase violence by orders of magnitude.
If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence? You obviously can't change their minds with censorship, only harden them.
A lot of people say "censorship radicalizes" but I've never seen any studies or evidence for this claim. Your comment is purely speculative. There is some evidence that banning extremist content reduces its potential to radicalize [1]. Do you have any evidence to suggest it increases radicalization?
Maybe not radicalizes but seems obvious that censorship sort of 'funnels' the extremists onto the same forums which turn into an echo chamber / amplification chamber for their ideas. It seems like if they were tolerated on other forums that there'd be enough mediating comments to prevent the amplification.
I'd also be interested in seeing studies that echo chambers increase radicalization in the first place. That seems to be a given right now.
> If a man can't speak his truth, what alternative does he have to violence?
No one is stopping anyone from speaking their truth. They're just saying they're not going to help you.
If you want to speak your truth, speak it. Go down to a public square and preach. Write your truth down, print it, and hand it out. If its truth and you believe it so much, you'll do the work necessary in getting it out there.
People are used to treating the Internet as the new public square. Obviously, there are many private entities that make up the Internet, but if want it to continue to serve as the public square (rather than a patchwork of corporate fiefdoms) then I think we have to accept the moral (and possibly legal) obligation of these private entities to maintain the Internet as a public square.
I essentially agree. The internet is not the public square, until you legally make it so.
And that essentially is not going to happen. Companies are "people too". They are allowed to express their free speech by not doing business with you.
Cloud Flare is within their rights to protect their stock value by doing business with whomever they choose. If the government declared the opposite, then it would truly require a massive shakeup of law and precedent.
> The internet is not the public square, until you legally make it so.
Culture and custom generally precede law and government. If the Internet is a public square, it is only so as a result of our various social relations. Passing laws would be merely to preserve it as such.
Shallow statistics are never going to replace empathy* when it comes to sound policy making.
That study does show that banning content within a forum means that you will get less of that content on that forum. A useful but not entirely surprising result. As a Reddit user, I'm glad that the site has less of such content.
It does not prove that censorship reduces "radicalization" (whatever that is). As the study says, many of those users just moved their content to Voat.
*By which I mean cognitive empathy: the capacity to infer the motivational states of other people and anticipate their actions.
I don't think that is how they come about. It is about recruitment and ideals and how they spread not about being banned on other platforms. If they could discuss saving the white race with violence on reddit or hackernews nothing would change more than they would have more potential recruits.
What will you do when your plan to censor the alt-right backfires and makes the violence worse? Attempt to start rounding them up? And when that makes it even worse?
You don't have a plan, just a knee jerk impulse to censor.
It's not censorship of the entire alt-right. It's the limited censorship on certain privately-run forums of a small subset that is directly advocating for violence and attempting to tear apart society.
If they want to speak in public, they are free to. They probably won't get a warm reception.
The US president supports and advocates for their cause. A national television syndicate (Fox) echos their talking points. I don't think you can call them censored.
Define 'citation', write a long essay about your criteria for accepting citations, maybe supply an appendix outlining your epistemological views so people know exactly what sort of citations you'll consider acceptable.
If the claim is [Donald Trump supports and advocates for ethno-nationalists causes] ...
I'd like to a source for that claim because it seems like Orange Man Bad delusions, but I'm willing to remain open minded if someone can provide a citation!
And I'd like to know what your standards are so I don't waste my time selecting and offering sources only to have them dismissed because you consider them deficient.
Since you already incline to the view that such assertions are delusional and employ a common political trope to characterize such delusions, I feel nagging doubts about your purported open-mindedness. Discussions like this generally devolve into pedantic quibbling which would be a waste of both your time and mine.
> If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence?
Plenty of nazi sites on the web where they make all sorts of “political cases”. Don’t confuse inability to make the case with repugnance to that case in general public.
If you want something that someone else has got, ask them for it. More often than not, they will give it to you.
If you find someone who is outpacing you, humble yourself for a damn minute and try asking them what they are doing that makes them so effective, then see if you can make it work for you.
If more engineers had this mindset, we'd all be better off.
Good point. I've more often been frustrated because I feel I'm the smartest in the room. I acknowledge this may be because of my own pride, but either way it sucks.
You know, Dang, this whole thread is a flame war topic. Why didn't you delete that? Oh, I know why, because it supports your side of the ideological narrative.
All people are asking is that you apply your own rules to your own selves. It should be obvious by now that these double standards do not make for community harmony.
It's a matter of degree. The OP has flamebait aspects, but it also has substantive, on-topic material. Obviously we're not going to treat all such stories as off-topic just because some people make flamewars out of them. If we did that, people could kill any story just by flaming enough.
"Blah blah blah what about nurses fuck you", on the other hand (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873), has no merit as a subtopic at all—not after the number of times we've all endured it. I trust that most HN readers understand that when we make a call like this, it isn't about ideology, but about not subjecting the community to tedium.
> your side of the ideological narrative
We hear this often enough from a minority of readers who feel strongly about ideology. However, it varies (quite reliably in fact) with the ideology of the beholder. To me that seems like evidence of cognitive bias at work, since it's same body of moderation decisions being interpreted in conflicting ways.
For a class X, all functions, including free functions, that both
(a) "mention" X, and
(b) are "supplied with" X
are logically part of X, because they form part of the interface of X.
So yes, f(x) is part of x's interface in C++, and has been considered to be so for a long time.
Please, please, please reconsider not enabling x.f(y) resolve to f(x, y).
You must explain to the detractors that they must reconsider allowing x.f(y) to resolve to f(x, y). This is not a selling out to OO, but in fact the opposite! Allowing x.f(y) to resolve as such enables us to finally get _away_ from OOP by using an alternative style called 'Data Abstraction Style'. I have written up an example of this style here - https://github.com/bryanedds/das
In PLT terms, data abstraction is the dual of OOP. In fact, I use it significantly in F# as a way to do pure functional programming where others just fall back into OOP - https://vimeo.com/128464151
Data Abstraction Style with resolution of free-standing functions to dot syntax gives us the best of both worlds - the increased modularity and extensibility of free-standing functions as well as the nice tooling and API explore-abily of the dot intellisense.
Finally, this syntax is important just to allow extension methods without a more specialized syntax that won't likely appear anyways.
Please pass along this information to the people holding out on allowing x.f(y) resolve to f(x, y) - it is not selling out to OOP - it's an elegant path to finally move beyond it. People must be made to understand this before making their final decision!
