...which is exactly how I concluded that the censorship we see online is basically necessary. The worst possible ways that online speech can be used against me include being murdered by a lone-wolf terrorist who received instruction online. The worst that can happen to me from censorship being imposed is that I will not be allowed to say certain things online or challenge those in power, or possibly that I will be excluded from these social networks entirely because the people in power do not like what I said -- which is certainly bad, but not quite as bad as being dead.
The unfortunate truth is that terrorist organizations use mainstream social networking sites to recruit and radicalize. We are sitting here talking about how power has been concentrated and how everyone is subject to censorship -- as if we did not just spend a decade watching ISIS and violent white nationalist groups amplify their messages by evading the controls that existed in legacy media outlets. "This is why we can't have nice things" is the expression that comes to mind...
> which is certainly bad, but not quite as bad as being dead.
This sort of reductionist argument doesn't work. If you start from the premise "any chance of dying is not worth it", then you won't do much of anything. Driving to the store could kill you, so now you can't go to the store?
You have to look at probability when assessing risk. Is a 0.0000001% reduction in your risk of death worth sacrificing all your personal freedom? I think most people would say no.
Except that it is not a miniscule chance of some violence occasionally being committed. ISIS nearly succeeded in establishing a new country in the territory they captured and it is absurd to pretend that they had not exploited poor moderation on major websites to recruit large numbers of people to their cause. White nationalists and neo-nazis have been equally effective in their use of social media to recruit members and to spread their propaganda.
We are not talking about isolated incidents or hypothetical scenarios. Extremists in the US and Europe are becoming part of the political mainstream because so many people believe the extremist propaganda they are reading on social media platforms. Those same extremists have inspired an increasing number of terrorist attacks as their propaganda has spread. For someone like me, someone who is part of a minority group that is frequently targeted by those terrorists, that represents an immediate and growing danger.
Really though, this entire debate is poisoned by extreme positions on free speech. I remember watching as unmoderated Usenet groups were overrun by neonazis; everyone fled to moderated newsgroups or off of Usenet altogether to some better-moderated platform. Free speech absolutism has never worked well and it is juvenile to pretend that the choice is between "sacrificing all your personal freedom" or taking an absolutist approach to free speech.
Franklin used that line in more than one context. He also said "The Massachusetts must suffer all the Hazards and Mischiefs of War, rather than admit the Alteration of their Charters and Laws by Parliament. They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I think less important than the nuance of what Franklin meant in any specific statement, is that what most people mean when they use that quote is its literal meaning, and that if you look at Franklin's life and body of work he was clearly a staunch defender of the idea that Liberty is a God-given (or inherent) right of mankind, and one worth defending.
Yes, it was interesting to read about the historical context, thanks for pointing it out. I also think the contemporary interpretation of literature, or a quote in this case, often matters more than what the author originally intended - it can take on a life of its own.
“It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.”
Free speech absolutism has not worked very well. Usenet was overrun by neonazis and all the interested discussions moved to moderated newsgroups/mailing lists/forums. A genocidal terrorist organization made effective us of various social media platforms to recruit large numbers of people to their cause and the world is a better place now that they have been banned.
Right now we are missing one of our best chances to end the COVID pandemic -- widespread vaccination -- because too many people are spreading lies about the vaccine on social media.
There is plenty of room for legitimate political debate, where people passionately advocate their preferred policies on various issues, without having to give a platform to people who are not arguing in good faith and whose real purpose is to advance a violent agenda. The cost of "free speech" is not "giving terrorists a platform to recruit and spread propaganda" and the politicians of Ben Franklin's generation actually did understand that (shortly after his death Congress passed the Sedition Act, which banned false statements about the US government to prevent foreign agents from destabilizing the newly formed country).
> Right now we are missing one of our best chances to end the COVID pandemic -- widespread vaccination -- because too many people are spreading lies about the vaccine on social media.
That's mostly a trust issue. If you silence their concerns you're just going to confirm that it's a grand conspiracy theory. You have to fight misinformation with the truth, with dialog, not with censorship.
It's a trust issue for some; others simply don't want to be told what to do. The more you shove the "get vaccinated" message in their faces the more they dig in and reject it.
the "concerns" are mostly coming from a small number of people that you probably wont be able to convince. Better to not use your platform to amplify them
This should be a non-issue. If these 12 bad guys have no points, no arguments, no good faith motives - that’s them against the entire western scientific community, the entire media, almost all politicians, celebrities, unions, vested interests…
How do you explain these “12 people” aren’t immediately shut down with all the facts?
Because facts aren't enough to win an argument. Especially when people pushing false conspiracy theories don't care about being consistent or accurate.
Especially when you need to "win" with over 95% of the population and not just a plurality or majority.
Also sadly some news media, some politicians, (don't know about labor unions sadly would not be totally surprised)some celebrities and vested interests are pushing harmful anti-vax agenda that hurts everyone.
And how many people did those neonazis actually effect? How many more people saw that and immediately criticized the neonazis who wouldn't have seen them before?
The answer to your questions are very many, and some. The numbers are of course relative, but consider the following:
During the 1980's early internet, white supremacist groups were among the first[0] to being using the new medium for organization and information purposes. They used it then to publish among other things a list[1] of "race traitors" etc including name, address, phone number, promulgate misinformation, gaslighting established norms and history (ex: Holocaust Denialism), and develop strategies for what can really only be described as terrorist indoctrination in many respects.
Some of the group involved killed a man with automatic weapons and hijacked an armored car with millions in cash to finance a separatist uprising. One of these was Louis Beam[2] who was a quite violent seditionist, and developed the "lone wolf" militia cell structure which is familiar today. Beam used these telecommunication/internet networks to create and distribute a lot of white separatist information. His activity goes on and on, it is quite vile in all respects. He has been charged and acquitted of sedition.
In this academic piece by sociologist Chip Berlet[3], he recounts attempting to counteract the white supremacy BBS with an anti-racist BBS at an Anti-Klan symposium. The understanding of BBS was quite poor at the time. By the 1990's the white-supremacist BBS network had grown quite a bit, distributing newspapers and operating file transfer and messaging services into a national network of neonazi BBS including Stormfront[4], which is of course still in operation, and is quite influential. They successfully transitioned to the ordinary internet and also AOL, using them as very effective recruitment tools.
Neonazi/white supremacist/separatist/seditionist groups have used the internet very effectively pretty much from the beginning. Perhaps this is an effect of Johnathan Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[5] as well as some kind of operationalized Poe's Law--race rallys thrive in protective shade. KKK marches and the like are routinely confronted by anti-racist counter-protests, but the current nature of online discourse continues to provide an asymmetric advantage to these types of activities. The old "Filter Bubble" doesn't lend many opportunities for normal people to insert themselves in the radicalization process...this could possibly be better than worse.
The literature on this is vast, exploring how a normal person can become radicalized into a racist white separatist is a strange rabbit hole to descend.
There exists a kind and inspiring man named Daryl Davis[6] who is pretty good at converting KKK/supremacists (he has many surprising success stories) away from this kind of behavior, but notice how his methodology requires a personal touch and much compassion. How many "more people saw that and immediately criticized the neonazis who wouldn't have seen them before?" is not a very good discriminator for this activity at all. Effectively, "None" is the real answer to your question.
The fact of the matter is that toxic memes and divisive trolling are consumed by people while on the can, idle-ly (or perhaps compulsevly) skimming social media and whatnot. The uncritical ingestion of this kind of thing simply habituates people to these kind of beliefs. I don't think a person who has fallen for this stuff is necessarily bad at first blush, and surely have many possibilities for redemption, but the effort required is really not the kind that is easily rallied.
It's a complicated notion, but it boils down to the fact that you have to fight Hate with Love.
Can you answer my questions? They paint a different story than what the NYT is telling you.
I'm being very sincere I want to get to the truth. If one person of a specific group does something bad and it gets mainstream news does the size of that group and overall impact it has increase? Of course not.
If there are less neonazis now than in the early days of the internet then doesn't that mean that having the ability to see their information actually exposed their bad ideas and allowed people to see them for what they actually are? Consider it.
I am struggling to see how this relates at all to how I have answered your rhetorical questions from before.
As you are well aware, it is a material thing how the structure of this kind of indoctrination occurs in society and this I have adequately described, albeit very briefly, as it has a long and colorful history.
I would like to answer your question in another fashion: Is Stormfront the KKK?
The argument that we should let neonazis/etc. parade their ideas around in public so that the world can see them for who they really are has become a lot less convincing because neonazis have refined their tactics (see e.g. "boots for suits"). They are not parading their hatred. Today they start with softer language, focusing on the supposed struggle of white people in America, how non-white people seem to be getting a leg up at the expense of white people, etc. Once they have drawn someone in, someone who for whatever reason found that the "great replacement" or "white genocide" theory resonated with them, they start to give the "explanation" for all the problems -- out of sight, away from people who might criticize them.
> The worst that can happen to me from censorship being imposed is that I will not be allowed to say certain things online or challenge those in power, or possibly that I will be excluded from these social networks entirely because the people in power do not like what I said -- which is certainly bad, but not quite as bad as being dead.
In the censored system, people in power can kill you, censor any talk about it, and no one will ever know.
I prefer the way things are run in countries like France and Germany, where people understand the value of free speech in debating politics and spreading new ideas while also recognizing that some limits are necessary (e.g. limits on speech that promotes a resurgence of nazism).
Every startup wants to be a new Facebook. Every modern society wants to be a new Sweden. Turns out that replicating successfully run communities - with their traditions, history and lifestyle - is extremely difficult, if ever possible.
The problem is, that the sentiment of "limits speech that promotes resurgence of X" is the same that dictatorships like Argentina used against the "subversives" that would promote and bring about communism.
When you allow the powerful to define "dangerous speech". Criticism of the government very quickly becomes dangerous when it's successful.
We've seen it with everything related to covid where in some countries people get arrested for "misinformation".
The slippery slope many warned about is very real, and very damaging.
That is an absolutist argument. Sure, some countries have used censorship in abusive ways, but I very specifically mentioned Germany. It was widely recognized after World War II that a resurgence of nazism would have been disastrous for Germany, and censorship was imposed to prevent the hundreds of thousands of committed nazi party members from trying to reestablish nazism. Censorship was absolutely necessary because propaganda had been so important in the rise of nazism in the first place, and because nazi ideas and the nazi world view did not simply die when Germany surrendered.
Despite very strict censorship laws related to nazi propaganda, nazi symbolism, and Holocaust denial, Germany ranks much higher than the United States in terms of press freedom and has ranked higher for many years. There is no serious argument that (modern, reunified) Germany is not a free society where people are free to criticize the government. Yes, there are limits to the ideas that are allowed to be publicly promoted or debated, because the same concerns about a resurgence of nazism remain relevant today (it has actually become worse in recent years).
The abuse of censorship laws on the part of dictatorships is not an argument against all censorship, any more than the abuse of the courts by dictatorships is an argument against the rule of law. Expansive censorship is a problem that works against the interests of a free society, but limited censorship is sometimes necessary to promote the interests of a free society.
If my argument is absolutist then your argument is authoritarian.
Mine is a safer proposition for the oppressed, for the minorities, for those not algined with the politics of the elites.
The whole argument about Nazi resurgence really falls flat when you realize that people get called Nazis for spousing wrongthink politics.
Your whole proposition is "the dangers of Nazism are too great". That's the same tactic I mentioned of "the dangers of communism" are too great.
If you want, ignore dictatorships. The slippery slope in non dictatorships is extremely damaging.
You're not gonna limit your censorship either, as you suggest in your last line. You're going to use it against your political foes to continue in or seize power.
Your motte and bailey tactics to get people to accept "some censorship for their own good" and then censor their speech that goes against your politics by calling it "Nazism" is a way bigger threat than the actual chance of "Nazi ideology". There was a time the ACLU safeguarded the right to say the most abhorrent of views the same you make sure due process is served even with the alleged most abhorrent criminals.
The unfortunate truth is that terrorist organizations use mainstream social networking sites to recruit and radicalize. We are sitting here talking about how power has been concentrated and how everyone is subject to censorship -- as if we did not just spend a decade watching ISIS and violent white nationalist groups amplify their messages by evading the controls that existed in legacy media outlets. "This is why we can't have nice things" is the expression that comes to mind...