It's hard to read any of these arguments in good-faith.
A single person has enough power to incite a mob that threatens the life of our government officials. That seems like "too much power" to me. A mob consisting of .001% of the US population threatening our cabinet seems like "too much power" to me.
Until we have a better way to figure out what causes that sort of conspiracy-theory mania, deplatforming is a million times better than insurrection.
Why is it hard to take it in good-faith? Regardless of one's political persuasion it should be chilling to anyone, especially the hacker types, to see how easily the tech companies can snuff voices out of existence. Who elected them? Whose interests do they serve? They should not have such power. We need real solutions to the speech problem and I fear that instead this knee jerk, performant stuff is going to backfire horribly.
Yeah but as hacker types people here should be looking at the fundamentals of the problem. I don't support free speech just for the sake of it. It serves a purpose to make society better off as a whole. The market place of ideas.
We well now know, and you can see it play out since the internet showed up - that content The ideas that win out are the ones best designed to encroach on the hind brain and avoiding the parts that analyze using reason.
Cat pics out perform everything.
Images beat long form arguments.
Machiavellian emotional constructs co-opt human brains, and a lawyer level eye for rhetoric, or blanket, unhelpful cynicism is needed to protect you.
If you actually want that market place to work, now we know that we have to act on speech that destroys reason.
The problem is who arbitrates which speech is good. If you look back at history there are many examples of speech that was suppressed because it was considered blasphemous or immoral only to later become orthodoxy. I think we are better off focusing our efforts on building back trust in journalism and teaching and empowering people to be skeptical and good critical thinkers. I do not think repression is going to work.
I don't think any future generations would look back at conspiring to hang lawmakers out in public as some orthodoxy that we were wrong to see as immoral.
I too thought the same, but because I like empirics, I went out and tested it.
Repression works.
You make a few assumptions here, which are important to examine.
First, it was centralized power of the church, which was fighting facts that were not in congruences with their beliefs. However, today the positions are reversed, it is faith in unreal outcomes that is asking for credibility at the same level as facts.
The people who stormed America's highest houses were there because they believed that an election wasn't fair. Nothing will convince them otherwise, no matter what the evidence.
This is the essence of faith, and exactly why free speech exists. To allow human beings to be governed by reason over unreason or emotion.
Secondly - we know for a fact, that emotion is the fastest way to co-opt logic. You can take a look at politics at home or around the world for evidence - wedge issues win, logic doesn't.
If you aren't going to exert a force to counter emotional manipulation, then your people will be emotionally manipulated. They will be manipulated the hardest, by those who find that certain facts don't work for them.
Finally - Journalism is failing because of other reasons than trust. It was an unviable market a while back. Their last source of income was the classifieds, and craigslist alone put an end to that.
Journalism which is beholden to advertising will always have to compete with entertainment. Meaning that if its not more entertaining than a sports channel, advertising money will simply go elsewhere.
I can only see independent, government or public founded journalism as the solution.
Someone in another comment pointed out that Trump can release press releases or call a press conference if he chooses, or give a speech from the Oval Office. Let’s explore that. If he uses the old media tools and goes on national TV to start directing insurrectionists to the next target, what then? Do we agree that they have a responsibility to cut him off?
The social networks and now Google and Apple are faced with an evolving volatile situation where the tools they supply are being used to foment an insurrection. They are taking steps to get ahead of what may happen in the event of Trump’s removal next week. Time is of the essence.
There will be time for more nuanced discussion when emotions have cooled. Now is emphatically not the time to try to have those discussions. We need to get through the next several weeks first.
By that logic, we need to immediately deplatform everyone though, right? Since any single person has that capability? Why wait until it happens, kick everyone off now!
On a more serious note, if a single person can raise a mob, that mob must have already been angry and out for blood in the first place which points to deeper underlying problems than just "this one person has too much power". The real solution is to address the underlying cause for the unrest and anger felt by the mob. Any other "solution" is at best a temporary bandaid.
Why do you say this as if that single person and his enablers haven’t been revving up this mob for years? The mob is angry about totally counterfactual nonsense that only exists because it was deliberately spread using the platform. That is the “underlying cause”.
Don’t confuse what this mob is angry about with all the actual legitimate reasons there are to be angry.
Everyone concern trolling over these things always brings up hypotheticals in an attempt to debate principals while fully ignoring everything that has actually happened in the real world.
Trump won in 2016 because the "mob" was already revved up and angry at a lot of the unfortunate legislation and narratives that already existed. He just capitalized and preyed on the existing outrage.
Yes, he and Fox and many other grifters added fuel to the fire, no question. But it's a mistake to just write off the millions upon millions of honest and good people who have been shafted by the system and are rightfully pissed while neoliberals and neocons crap all over them.
I didn’t write them off — quite the opposite! A crowd raiding the Capitol because they’re angry about nonexistent vote fraud and child pornography rings run by the Democrats has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate concerns you’re talking about. It’s deliberate provocation spread using social media to distract from the actual issues.
If there were legitimate leadership that honestly wanted to address the issues you’re talking about, we’d be seeing debates in the Capitol, not a crowd trying to set it on fire. This is the result of years of party leadership that just wants to stir up emotion to get people locked into irrational loyalty, rather than actually doing anything to help people.
Trump deliberately amplified the nonsense and used it to build a cult of personality rather than doing real political work. He’s the one disrespecting the people who elected him in 2016, not me.
Why are you so scared of people being allowed to express their political power? Words and rhetoric is how it’s always been. Are you for censoring all political speech? Given the highly partisan nature of the censorship, difficult to not see it being politically motivated.
You've been using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they're battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for, i.e. curious, thoughtful conversation.
I hate to ban an 11-year-old account, but I had to scroll back two months in your comment history to find a post about ZFS. That's seriously uncool. Between that and the fact that we've warned you many times not to abuse the site like this, I think we have to ban your account and I've done so. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Have y’all considered suspensions (temporary bans) for people to cool off for a few months and reconsider? I’d be curious to see how many came back abusing right away.
A single person has enough power to incite a mob that threatens the life of our government officials. That seems like "too much power" to me. A mob consisting of .001% of the US population threatening our cabinet seems like "too much power" to me.
Until we have a better way to figure out what causes that sort of conspiracy-theory mania, deplatforming is a million times better than insurrection.