
How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature - jayess
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/magazine/how-hate-groups-forced-online-platforms-to-reveal-their-true-nature.html
======
xienze
I know everyone is going to say "but Nazis", but I think this incident should
really drive home just how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be
purged from the Internet and just how much power tech companies truly wield
over us. Yeah yeah I know, it's great because they stood up to Nazis but next
time it won't just be them. It's very easy to label just about anything as
"hate speech".

And yeah yeah, "private companies can't censor, only the government can", but
has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political
affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further
their agendas? If you're not concerned with the implications of this you're
not paying attention.

~~~
bilbo0s
"...but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious
political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order
to further their agendas?..."

Have you, yourself, stopped to consider the possibility that large
corporations have had very obvious political affiliations, and have been
exerting their control to further their agendas since long before Google
existed?

~~~
xienze
Have you considered that Google, Facebook, etc. can control public discourse
and what information people can see in ways never before thought possible?

~~~
bilbo0s
Have you considered that advisers for Nixon's first Presidential campaign made
the same complaint about network television?

My only point here is that many, many companies have been exerting their
control for many, many years to further the varied agendas of their principal
shareholders.

This really is nothing new.

~~~
reaperducer
Not new. But better. More effective. Which is worse.

~~~
stefs
more effective than the kronen-zeitung?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronen_Zeitung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronen_Zeitung)

------
tinalumfoil
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right
> includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive
> and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of
> frontiers. - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

A lot of people here have been trying to defend free speech as a human right,
and a right that all people and corporations have a responsibility to
preserve. No matter how many appeals to authority, appeals to history or long-
winded explanations used all these arguments have fallen flat on people who
either don't agree with free speech, or believe it's only the problem of a
small number of institutions.

I believe there's enough people who support speech as a human right that these
companies will end up on the wrong side of history and be superseded by more
content-neutral hosts. It would be nice if this had more support, but there's
enough people demanding companies, who are denying service to groups with the
intention that they are unable to find hosting elsewhere, that I think the
near future of speech is safe, and will come back stronger.

EDIT: Reworded second paragraph

~~~
nnutter
I am having a hard time deciphering what your position is.

~~~
hanklazard
Appears to be: pro free-speech and against the moves of censorship by
companies like Facebook and Cloudflare.

------
hitekker
Key point of the article:

> Questions about how platforms like Twitter and Reddit deal with disruptive
> users and offensive content tend to be met with defensive language invoking
> free speech.

> In the process of building private communities, these companies had put on
> the costumes of liberal democracies. They borrowed the language of rights to
> legitimize arbitrary rules, creating what the technology lawyer Kendra
> Albert calls ‘‘legal talismans.’’

> What better way to avoid liability and responsibility for how customers use
> your product? It was also good marketing. It’s easier to entrust
> increasingly large portions of your private and public life to an
> advertising and data-mining firm if you’re led to believe it’s something
> more.

I've noticed this most distinctly with Reddit. Why haven't all the hate
subreddits been banned? /r/physical_removal was exhorting for the deaths of
thousands months prior to Charlottesville. The admins proclaim free speech,
but under this thin excuse, lies their business model.

Toxic users are extremely active. They have to be. Spewing vitriol, spreading
hate, posting canards necessitate constant engagement.

Looking at the tables of monthly metrics, who is more valuable? That one user
with 10,000 internet points flaming other users every hour of the day, or the
occasional commenter who writes longwinded but intellectually honest posts?

I can tell you which one is far more numerous, and I can tell you which one
Reddit raised millions on.

Ultimately, I would argue that this pretense is is designed to morally justify
the power these platforms wield over their users. To do any less, especially
for an overly-dominant player, sets the stage for regulatory action, backed by
popular demand.

edit: removed slight political slant.

~~~
tim333
>Why hasn't /r/the_donald been banned?

He did win the election. You can ban extremists but I'm not sure banning
fairly mainstream stuff is the way to go.

~~~
hitekker
Correct, I have shifted my intro to focus on extremists.

------
MBCook
> The platforms’ sudden action in response to an outpouring of public grief
> and rage resembles, at first glance, a moral awakening and suggests a
> mounting sense of responsibility to the body politic.

Resembles is the key word here. Many of the sites knew this stuff was going on
and didn't mind at all. Unfortunately I think this is all reactionary and
they're not going to keep these policies up. They only care they're getting
bad press, not because they ACTUALLY care about the issue.

For example it's nice that Twitter removed a bunch of problematic accounts,
but there are TONS more. Reddit still has plenty of very problem subreddits.
I'm sure there are still problematic Facebook pages.

Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg'
so now they're good?

~~~
random023987
> Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do
> somethinrg' so now they're good?

If companies were honest in their EULA (or employment agreements), they would
simply say that you will be removed if you cause the company to receive bad
press.

~~~
MBCook
Much like Apple and many of its app review terms I wish some of these
companies would actually enforce their EULA.

------
cm2187
This endless stream of articles, posts on HN, counter demonstrations, is
giving to a tiny minority of a few thousand extremists a media coverage they
could only dream of. Kind of like terrorism, the more you make a big deal out
of a terrorist attack, the more you encourage the next one.

But newspapers and TV news aren't in the business of rational moderation.

~~~
Houshalter
The interest from HN isn't about the Nazis, but the changing attitudes in the
tech industry towards censorship and ideological homogeneity. It would be just
as interesting and alarming if it was the other way and communists were
getting banned and fired.

~~~
Asooka
It is, in fact, alarming that the communists aren't being silenced, since this
is how we ended up with communist regimes the first time around.

------
s73ver_
A good part of it is that regular people don't want to deal with them. They
don't want to hear from them, and they definitely don't want to be harassed by
them.

Look at the "free speech" platforms, the *Chans. They may not have started out
as bastions for neo-nazis and racists, but they became that because, as hate
speech and such was not really policed on there, normal people stopped going
altogether, leaving only those people behind.

~~~
jquery
> leaving only those people behind.

If you think only neo-nazis and racists hang out on the Chans, you definitely
don't hang out there.

"The strategy [of people who consider themselves the protectors of decency] is
weaponized stereotype campaigns. If a site tolerates witches, describe it as a
witch site about witchcraft populated entirely by witches. It’s super easy."
\- [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-
centrali...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-
web/)

~~~
s73ver_
I'm not saying they're the only ones, but you cannot deny that those sites
have a large proportion of that kind of content.

~~~
Asooka
Ironically, it's much easier not to interact with that content on 4/8chan than
it is on the wider Internet. If you're not there for political shitposting,
don't visit /pol/.

------
gedy
I just cannot see the difference between banning those 'far right' groups
while allowing 'far left' which are basically the same. The red flag, pictures
of Mao, Stalin are as hateful to me as Hitler and Nazi imagery, especially
given the 10x body count that revolutionary communism resulted in.

~~~
random023987
> The red flag, pictures of Mao, Stalin

Where do you live that you see people marching in the street waving flags of
communist dictatorships and ranting against immigrants and... whatever the
leftist version of anti-Semitism is... maybe... anti-vaccination? (that's
sorta equally irrational)

~~~
xienze
The left is very much pro-Palestine, anti-Israel. You must not be paying
attention.

And if you want to see Communist flags, go to any Bay Area protest. There's
always Communist hangers-on in attendance.

~~~
random023987
> The left is very much [...] anti-Israel.

That's funny, someone should tell that to המחנה הציוני

------
1053r
The irony of this article is deep. It is literally making a "First they came
for the neo-nazis, and I said nothing" argument. As a coworker of mine just
said, "We might be standing on a slope here, but it isn't really slippery."

~~~
tbrownaw
First they came for the damn commies, but McCarthy was before my time.

------
tim333
>...Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature

The article seems argue that it's just been revealed that Facebook, Twitter,
Reddit et al are, shock horror, "profit-driven entities, free to do as they
please." As if we didn't know that already. It also kind of paints them as
faceless corporations with shady agendas but in the case of Facebook and
Reddit they are both still basically run by the programmers that wrote the
first code and try run them in a common sense sort of way. Here they are
chatting about these kind of things

Zuck [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-
facebook-c...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-facebook-
censorship-after-staff-admit-deactivating-trending-stories-1560059)

Huffman
[https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s](https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s)

Edit - changed the Zuck link...

------
nemo44x
I do wonder how this disagrees with the popular argument in favor of net
neutrality? The point being that limiting who can distribute and therefore
create access to information is generally agreed upon as unacceptable.

Would it be different if service providers (your ISP) made some content they
select inaccessible (not net neutral) rather than Google et al?

------
Blackthorn
Sites have been doing this for ages for things like terrorist materials and
other forms of extremism, but as soon as white people get censored everyone
suddenly gets up in arms.

------
djflutt3rshy
>It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly dedicated to a
borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that have
struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and disrupt
their platforms.

THIS is what ultimately changed my mind about whether Internet companies
should offer "free speech" as a positive. I used to believe that the antidote
to hateful speech was simply more speech. But every site that's been tried on,
fell to more and more hateful speech, pushing and bending and breaking the
norms, until sane people left out of disgust or were relegated to their own,
more moderated, parts of the site.

Germany and other European countries with anti-Nazi laws have it right (and
no, they haven't descended into totalitarian regimes, the slippery slope
simply stopped at "Don't be a Nazi".)

~~~
jquery
The laws against hate speech are great until suddenly they aren't. Germany's
laws are making it criminal for citizens to engage in honest debate about the
refugee crisis.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany-
passes-law-against-online-hate-speech/442031001/)

------
ebola1717
Interesting argument. Usually when people make this sort of "virtue
signaling," they don't provide much analysis of the history and ramifications,
as this article does.

Democratically accountable decision makers, uniformly enforced policies and
standards, and making these systems actually function like our legal systems,
rather than shallowly mimicking them sounds like a huge improvement over the
status quo.

~~~
matt4077
"Virtue signalling" is the most tired cliché of an argument. It's cynicism is
best demonstrated by the simple fact that it works against anything someone
says, as long as it is somehow not completely offensive.

It's also a great example of assuming bad faith, and failing Occam's razor:
instead of the obvious conclusion that most people tend to emphasise with
victims of injustice, it constructs a complicated mechanism to explain how
someone can be a bad person using their words and actions that say the
opposite.

~~~
lhnz
Are you also against the terms 'hypocrite' and 'cheap talk'?

~~~
Apocryphon
Those are more neutral, less loaded terms. Like it or not, virtue signaling is
one of those neologisms that has become ideologically slanted, like "homicide
bomber" or "microaggression."

By all means, it is far better to use common parlance.

~~~
lhnz
It's not loaded. These terms are synonymous.

The word is an apt description of something very real and very common [0]:
people hiding their greatest moral failings behind ultimately empty virtuous
performances.

It's unsurprising that the only people calling it 'loaded' and despairing over
the existence of the term, identify with the group it's most often used to
describe. And it's unsurprising that they would misunderstand it to be a term
that you use to describe virtuous acts instead of sanctimonious frauds.

Desperately wishing that you were able to police the language of your
political rivals isn't a good argument for getting rid of a phrase.

Also, if every time somebody uses the term, and somebody jumps in to say "I
think you mean 'they're being a sanctimonious hypocrite'" then really it will
just be emphasizing the meaning. I don't see what you expect to gain from
this...

[0] [http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-
infide...](http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-
affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/)

~~~
Apocryphon
There are some phrases which, despite their ostensibly unbiased definition and
utility, end up being colored by overuse by one partisan side or another.
Immediately jumping to accuse critics of those phrases of being on the
opposite partisan side only reinforces the biased nature of the phrase. Are
you triggered?

It is interesting that one of the earlier pop uses of "virtue signaling" was
on LessWrong, and hence fairly apolitical [A]. But it seems to have been
mostly used by the right. If one was to see a lot of leftist groups calling
freedom of speech protesters or statue protectors "virtue signalers", then the
phrase would indeed retain its original apolitical, universal nature. The
article also gives some interesting analysis about how the original term has
semantically drifted over the years to become watered down in meaning- at
least according to Sam Bowman.

[A]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling)

~~~
lhnz
Good response.

I do agree with Sam Bowman that the term is often misused (and that it doesn't
make as much sense as it should since the word 'signalling' is meant to refer
to costly signals and not 'cheap talk'), however my belief is that people are
critiquing because the term is hitting 'too close to home' rather than because
the term warrants serious criticism.

~~~
lhnz
@matt4077:

    
    
      > Here's an analogy, a term I abhor for the
      > same reason: "mansplaining".
      >
      > It's a similarly cheap and unfair argument, because 
      > it's completely generic and can be used in any
      > discussion. It's also impossible to argue
      > against, because it uses any answer as proof.
    

Yes, agreed. That term often gets used when somebody isn't merely re-
explaining what somebody already knows and is in fact giving new information
from their own personal experiences in good-faith.

I don't really use the term 'virtue signalling' anymore, but I do get annoyed
when somebody uses it and another person jumps in to tell them that they're
not allowed to say it because it is used by the wrong sort of person or
because it has no meaning. It does have a meaning and it is sometimes
appropriate: male feminists who turn out to be using this identity to cloak
their misogyny, politicians preaching about peace but consistently voting to
bomb countries, Ivanka Trump harnessing a feminist image to hawk sweatshop
clothing, etc.

Actually, I feel the same way about 'mansplaining'. There are cases where men
step-in to re-explain what a woman just said to her or to others in a louder,
more-confident tone and in these cases I think it's a great word.

 _Edit: You deleted your comment but I had already written this so I 've
posted it anyway._

~~~
Apocryphon
But none of those examples actually involve self-sacrifice in order to
perpetuate falsehood. Those are examples of hypocritically showing off. It's
an example of specialized technical jargon that does have valid specific use,
but has been watered down to score cheap ideological points, an indictment of
the target of being textbook irrational. How ironic that the use of the phrase
has become an act of virtue signaling, in of itself!

~~~
lhnz
Er, yeah, a more legible description is "virtue cheap talking" and not "virtue
signalling".

But it's quite likely that usage of the latter term has always been a
sarcastic jibe about the fraudulent/low-investment quality of the 'virtuous'
acts that are being performed.

------
irishasaurus
"This was also a moment these hate groups were anticipating; getting banned in
an opaque, unilateral fashion was always the way out and, to some degree, it
suits them."

I think this is the viewpoint all coverage needs to employ. That these groups
are already trying to frame themselves as victims and media needs to preempt
this by framing their cries for what they are, a quick slip and fall scam.

*Edited for clarity

~~~
Spivak
Surely your irony detector must have went off writing this statement. One of
the core message of these groups is that the media is biasing their coverage
against them in an attempt to sway public opinion and your suggestion is to
prove their point?

~~~
irishasaurus
My suggestion is to highlight the tactic so others can see it for what it is.

~~~
Spivak
I honestly don't know if it would help. You could try and argue that they're
setting themselves up as victims but the other side of the coin is that
they're exposing the true feelings and cruelty of the people they've been
claiming are using their power to discriminate and silence them.

I don't think there's much to be gained by putting on a circus that exposes
the Nazis as the scheming bad guys -- it's already in the name. They're
provoking a reaction from groups and people who have been long claiming to be
tolerant and respectful of dissenting views.

The way I see it the only way out is to be the better people, let them say and
do as they please, challenge and criticize their ideas openly, respectfully,
and with evidence, and be secure in the fact that in the long run they'll be
proven wrong.

------
newswriter99
"There are hard-right alternatives to Twitter, to Reddit and even to the
still-mostly-lawless 4chan."

The writer obviously has no idea what 4chan looked like before the fappening.

------
caseysoftware
I keep wondering how this meshes with the common carrier rules/designation.
Does it put Facebook, Twitter, et al at more or less risk as a result? How
does this fit with the pro-net neutrality positions that these companies have
staked out?

"Put simply, common carriers are private companies that sell their services to
everyone on the same terms, rather than companies that make more
individualized decisions about who to serve and what to charge. [snip]
Congress created laws to make sure that phone companies provided basic phone
service to all customers on a non-discriminatory basis and at reasonable
prices, and created the FCC to regulate them."

Ref: [https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-
good-t...](https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-good-thing-
that-broadband-isnt-a-common-carrier/)

~~~
matt4077
Those things have nothing to do with each other. Common carrier rules and net
neutrality are attributes of companies enjoying a natural monopoly: that of
often being the only one running a cable to your door.

Besides, Facebook, Twitter etc. crossed that particular rubicon long ago when
they started deleting, for examples, images of nudity.

