Unless people are inciting violence or organizing systematic discrimination, I think people should be free to say whatever they want. I understand why some people want to ban such speech, and there will always be those people, and there will always be ignorance and bigotry. It’s a slippery slope to give a subset of people control over what is allowed to be said. Maybe someone will point out my ignorance, too.
>Unless people are inciting violence or organizing systematic discrimination,
The whole purpose of the first and second amendments are so that - when, not if - our own government becomes tyrannical we can organize, and violently overthrow it.
Inciting violence (particularly against the government) is literally the whole point of the first two.
The US government is not supposed to rule, it's supposed to serve. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that. It's not only our right, specifically protected by the Bill of Rights, it's our duty and we can't even begin to do that if "inciting violence" is prohibited speech.
>It’s a slippery slope to give a subset of people control over what is allowed to be said.
The issue isn't even control, it's that there exists no person or organization that can be trusted with this power.
People are free to say what they want. People are not free to say whatever they want on another person's infrastructure. Those people are free to limit what they want to host.
I completely support freedom of speech. But what if there are people or companies who are making money from spreading complete lies which are very harmful to the society? I am happy for them to say what they want to small groups of people, but should they be allowed access to public platforms with millions of people?
I think it depends on your definition of freedom of speech. I don't support providing a platform for harmful lies to spread e.g. QAnon
In my opinion, internet and social media changed the game. Freedom of speech now is not the same as freedom of speech 200 years ago. The spread of information now is massive and instanteneous, and people are up against ML models which are being trained to grab their attention. For example, Cambridge Analytica - were their actions an exercise of freedom of speech or exploitation of social media?
> It’s a slippery slope to give a subset of people control over what is allowed to be said.
Hate speech is also a slippery slope, as the Rwandan genocide and many other genocides/massacres attest to.
For those arguing for unfettered speech on social media, if you're going to convince me of your argument, you at least need to acknowledge that this history exists. If you're focused only on the risks associated with clamping down on free speech (which I agree are very real risks) and ignore the flip side of that coin, then it's hard to take the argument seriously.
The best I've heard from people making your argument is hand-wavy sloganeering of tired, unoriginal memes like "the best disinfectant is sunlight" or "the solution to bad speech is more speech", with at most one small anecdote provided in support of this idea.
The Rwandan genocide happened in 1994. What makes you think the Internet or unconstrained speech on the Web had anything to do with it? Social Media wasn't even a thing by that point. You're still in pervasive dial-up and chatroom territory.
If you're talking one of the more recent ones, (last decade or so) that Facebook shoulders some of the blame for, you'd literally have to surveill Every. Last. Communique. Which everyone with any sense should recognize as an Orwellian Dystopian nightmare, and a fruitless moving target, because as soon as groups of interest realize they are being monitored, arms races and coded communique come into play.
So it isn't moving goalposts. It's a simple statement that the individual's desire for a hate-speech free Internet is not so great it warrants laying the technical foundation and infrastructure which in the wrong hands will absolutely be abused. Certainty factor of 1.
Technology empowers everyone equally, especially those already in a position of power that we really don't want to make exercising control practical for. That's the people problem that no application of technology can fundamentally solve for.
> What makes you think the Internet or unconstrained speech on the Web had anything to do with it?
That is not what I think. Hate speech is the causal factor that I'm talking about, not the medium. People used the most effective tools that were available to them at the time. Before it was radio, print or film. Now it's social media.
> Orwellian Dystopian nightmare
I agree that speech restrictions can progress into an Orwellian nightmare.
But, again, you've ignored the flip side. Hate speech can also progress into an Orwellian nightmare. It's happened throughout history.
So we have two opposing things that can each potentially lead to an Orwellian nightmare. Yet in your argument you've ignored the latter, only focusing on the risks of the former. That's why I am unconvinced by this line of argumentation. It is ahistorical in the way that it downplays the causal factors that lead to genocides and massacres.
To convince me, you'll have to explain why the former is more likely to lead to a bad outcome than the latter, while keeping true to history.
I believe strong language can escalate things, but there is no causal relationship to conflicts as it was believed for the longest time. Especially if you look at different online communities, vulgar language doesn't even seem to have an effect on conflicts. Sometime people even calm down after having had the ability to vent.
Wars happen for different reason. I wouldn't know of any war started by strong language.
One point of the conflict was that speech was restricted too much as far as I know, that can easily escalate a conflict.
Are you saying that there is no causal link between hate speech and genocides/massacres? Because that's historically not accurate. Here's a recent example:
What conservatives ignore (and I consider myself pretty conservative-leaning) is that there's a grey area of speech that doesn't rise to direct incitement to violence but that nevertheless contributes to a climate that leads to genocide.
Other examples: The Der Sturmer publication in the 1920s Germany, and the hate speech being broadcast on public radio in Rwanda, among other examples. This speech galvanizes the general public against a group, which can lead to a not-so-great outcome for them.
Who but the audience has control over whether or not to be convinced?
This is the part I won@t budge policywise on. I won't accept a Big-Brother-Knows-Best arrangement where some nebulous group gets to wield absolute control over what things people say get to be heard.
For every untouchable, despised viewpoint in the town square are instances beyond number of parents warning children to take that individual as an example not to be. Or instances of a future being moved to counter the movement. Life, and by extension free-speech, is risky. We know this. We've known this. We will hopefully teach our children the same so they too will know.
Ours is not the right to forge their chains. Liberty is important, hard won, and easily lost, and difficult to reclaim. Does that mean unpopular movements gain momentum? That lives may be lost? Yes. Does that mean we should abandon all semblance of commitment to Liberty, and erect the illusion of a safe world only to have it be shattered again and again in a self-reinforcing spiral whereby more and more liberty is ceded to authorities so they can deliver more safety?
I'm a Jew, a Zionist, and a knee-jerk supporter of Israel. That makes me the type of person many of these posts are hating on. But I don't think that they should be taken down. I would rather that the hatred of me and my tribe remain public and visible, so that we can see it and respond appropriately. Hiding it does not remove the sentiment or the danger. Words spoken against such hate, convincing people that it is not justified, are triggered by such posts too, yet those are also suppressed when the hate message is suppressed.
I want to know who hates me and why. Protecting me from that endangers me more.
Completely agree with that. Sounds cynical, but if people didn't have some unsoclicited opinions on Jews, something would be wrong and it would be time to keep an eye out for real danger.
I'm with you, it's more just telling that these companies say they want to take down hateful speech, but anti-semetism always seems to be the exception. If I was setting their content policy I would allow it to, but something is off about claiming to be stop hatred but turning a blind eye to jews.
> I would allow it to, but something is off about claiming to be stop hatred but turning a blind eye to jews.
If they are true to enforcing their guidelines equally, then I should not be seeing 84% of anti-semitic posts still spreading around on these social media websites.
Either it is open season on 'hateful content' so that we can see who posted what and why, or everything gets banned entirely and every post is policed with 'guideline checks' everywhere.
A common argument is that allegations of anti-semitism are used to shut down criticism of Israel. That's clearly true. It's also true that a lot of the criticism of Israel is based on anti-semitism. Good luck sorting that out with internet censorship!
Is it even tenable to build an app or product centered around a social feed anymore? Manual moderation is cost prohibitive and does not scale. Algorithmic moderation gives some hope but there is a certain dystopian future that seems unavoidable in that direction.
How would I go about building an accessible social feed that cannot be censored? Is there any country and/or technology in the world that is viable now and in the long term?
Yes, the evolution of the GS conspiracies are just putting a name to the "Jews are running the world" conspiracies, giving him god like powers to manipulate and control.
There's a pretty big gulf between disliking someone and spreading inane anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Most of the "criticisms" I see of him are very much the latter, verging on Pizzagate territory.
I've witnessed this kind of mislabeling on many occasions. Once I was on a forum chatting about how the reserve banks are controlling everything and also distorting culture and then some random person told me I was "anti-semitic" but I hadn't mentioned Jewish people even once. Religion hadn't even occurred to me as being a factor in my discussion. I told the person that they're the ones who are anti-Semitic for inferring that there is a connection between reserve banking and Judaism.
I've witnessed this behavior in other places and on social media. I don't know what the goal is of this false labeling.
As with antisemitism itself there might be some overlap, but I think most people basically criticise foreign NGOs meddling in domestic politics and feel passed over. Money in politics is not ideal, although there are far worse players than Soros in my opinion and I don't know of a single case where he didn't just support people to take part in democracy.
Does this include all the legitimate criticisms of Israel that people try to lazily deflect with accusations of antisemitism? Who is doing the counting?
That report doesn't explicitly states omitting criticism against Israel, any report about anti-semitism that isnt explicitly stating when are Israel/Palestinian conflict comments considered anti-semitism (and when are not) is lacking depth.
Not really, nothing wise given that if you are trying to measure something you need to clearly define it first, and given the amount of controversy around (some or all) criticism against Israel being anti-semitism you need to first clearly define what you are considering is anti-semitism and what is not.
The problem with banging the drum about "legitimate criticisms of Israel" is that they're co-occurent with illegitimate criticisms and anti-semitism.
There's also a very special kind of monomania. Some big account will post on Twitter or Facebook lamenting violence. "This synagogue in London got vandalized!" for instance, or perhaps "this US citizen living in the state of New York was beaten and there's security camera footage." Then about 500 people will immediately jump in to post, "Israel is bad!!"
Here, for instance, is Chelsea Football Club tweeting this past May, about a week after a Norwich synagogue was graffiti'd with a Swastika:
https://twitter.com/ChelseaFC/status/1396189477173923853
"Chelsea FC stands with the UK's Jewish community, and Jewish communities across the world, in the face of rising antisemitism. This hatred and intimidation towards the Jewish community is unacceptable and must stop."
Here's a blue check reply (accompanied by dozens of random Tweeters with the same sentiment):
Consider replacing this with any other race. "Discrimination against African-Americans is bad!" posts the NFL, as someone has burned a cross in front of a Black church. But the Twitter replies stridently call out: "Look at the violence in Africa! Look at the dictatorships! Look at all those schoolgirls who were kidnapped in Zimbabwe!" Would you really tolerate that kind of reply for a second longer than it took you to overcome your disbelief?
Ok, true for replies on unrelated subjects, but stand-alone posts with criticism against Israel also attract that kind of people so then what is the solution, to not post criticism against Israel because it attracts antisemitic people? To not create groups on FB about it for the same reason?
African schoolgirls being kidnapped is very different than an apartheid state where the colonizers regularly oppress and murder the indigenous. In May 2021, when that tweet was posted, Palestinian homes were being stolen by what is considered an illegitimate state. Those anti-Israeli posts didn't come out of nowhere.
I mean they give some high level examples but it's mostly non-specific and at the discretion of a group whose missions is to report this stuff... In other words... show me the data!
Why would I need TFA to mention it when I've seen with my own eyes three or four Netanyahu UN hissy fits? You know, the ones where someone curtails military aid and he stands up and compares it to the holocaust?
Frankly when us Jews call out anti-Semitism, the whole room stands up to tell us what is and is not anti-Semitism. Imagine doing that to LGBT folks or other minorities. I'm not even much of an Israel supporter but it is exhausting to hear a bunch of white progressives who have never set foot in the Middle East tell me I am wrong about the criticism I hear.
Recently, folks at Rutgers have been criticizing Campus Hillel as a Zionist organization. The place where your average secular Jewish college students gets Challah bread once a semester. Yet saying "that is anti-semitic" invites a whole bunch of people to whitesplain to you why it isn't.
When synagogues in the UK are being vandalized with swastikas, when residents of New York and US citizens are getting beaten on Fifth Avenue, and people lament these things on social media, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Israel's action as a country. Yet this is the norm.
As a low-middle class white person who struggles to be heard, I find the term 'whitesplain' to be offensive. For the same reason that I find the term 'mansplaining' offensive when applied to some shy guy trying to express their opinion for the first time.
A more appropriate term would be 'richsplaining'; when a rich person tries to explain to a poor person how the world is. It's not about race, it's about wealth. It's still not 100% correlation, but it's closer.
I have posted elsewhere in this thread about the reply of "anti-Zionism" which you will find whenever someone complains about anti-Semitic attacks and prejudice in places which are very much not Zion. If it's not anti-Semitic in intent, it's monomaniacal and inappropriate to the point where it's anti-Semitic in practice.
Allow me to revive the destroyed comment for the sake of the argument:
> > Hate speech doesn't exist, they made up the term to shut you up.
Sort of, it is difficult to draw the line somewhere because some people will disagree on the 'rules' and definition of what 'hate speech' is.
> Comment was of course flagged. Because this website (like most of the internet), is controlled by the far left. Which seem to sympathize with censorship for whatever reason.
I don't know about that one. But even when I present strong evidence to my claims, follow the guidelines, I still get downvoted without reason or any response as to why.
As for censorship, you know that there are some HNers here who would do anything to defend their companies name; even if it means flagging and downvoting you right?
I read the concept of 'hate speech' was invented after the Seargent's Affair. The British public was incensed at Jews after the murder of four British soldiers in Palestine, so the powerful Jewish lobby in Britain agitated that one shouldn't be able to target "religious" groups. These posts are mostly trash, since Jews have a huge animosity towards the West which they call Edom and Christianity in particular, as they consider it the source of anti-semitism, but we never see posts about that on the orange site.
Comment was of course flagged. Because this website (like most of the internet), is controlled by the far left. Which seem to sympathize with censorship for whatever reason.
I think if you take down these sorts of posts you may create a Streisand effect where it actually makes the problem worse.
In general though I don't think social media platforms should be taking down content that does not violate the law or that the law should be expanded to cover "hate speech." In the USA at least free speech has worked pretty well so far.
It's pretty... interesting, that the new expected norm is that all hateful / offensive posts are taken down on the internet. 10 years ago, this would be a very confusing headline to read.
I don’t know about ten years ago, twenty maybe. But the internet of today is not the internet of then.
Back then someone could have created an offensive blog and it wouldn’t have been taken down. But people would have to link to it, seek it out. Now we have social media sites algorithmically pushing content in our faces, IMO it’s only fair that they’re asked to consider what they’re pushing when they do it.
Without getting into the debate at all, the main focus of recent moderation attempts have been to target "abuse"/"hate speech", however you want to define that.
Adding "offensive" widens the scope enormously and unfairly and suddenly we're into the realms of restricting the freedom of speech for normal everyday situations.
This is extremely fuzzy line and pretty much nobody agrees where offense stops and hate starts. It's dishonest to try to distinguish a line between the two because it will inevitably move over time at the whims of the moderators.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think the line is as extremely fuzzy as you say, otherwise there'd be relative anarchy.
There are some generally accepted "yes" and "no's", and then, yes, there's a few things at the edge that might give me cause to think twice.
If defining that line is "extremely fuzzy" to you, then you're already way too far down the rabbit hole (in my opinion) and I won't be following you down there.
The dog whistle cuts both ways. I've heard more than enough anti-semitic stuff thinly veiled as criticism of Israel and I am a Jew firmly against the occupation.
I sympathize. I've noticed that there is a clear trend for mentally unstable people to fixate on jews as some sort of booheyman. honestly its really strange and I don't really know what it is about jews specifically that attracts those wackos.
I've also been personally called anti-Semitic merely for criticizing the treatment of Palestinians and advocating for Israel to pull out of the west bank and broker a deal to allow palestinians to self govern and coexist.
also note: its been less than 5 min since posting and already 5 downvotes! also apparently flagged... well I expected that.
You can hold multiple things in your mind at once. "The Jews" are not Israel.
The idea that anti-semitism is somehow intrinsically tied to Palestine is historically and obviously false. While there's plenty of reasons to hate Israel for its actions on Palestine the history of pogroms, blood libel, genocide, expulsions, etc goes on centuries before there was ever a nation to hate in the first place.
so first of all, I'm going to say that I agree with you in that antisemetism is a problem that predates the creation of Israel. While I disagree with the motivations for its founding, I understand why it happened given the sheer impact of the atrocity of the holocaust. It should never happen again.
I personally feel that should apply to everyone. No group of people should have to bear with an occupation and genocide. With that, Its a bit disingenuous when I see how israel treats the palestinian people. Here we are talking about internet memes that are antisemetic. I agree its a serious problem but at the same time, we have mainstream media which dehumanizes palestinians. Its close to career suicide to advocate for their rights if you're in the media. These people live completely annexed to an open air prison. For them a 9/11 type event is a tuesday.
You can hold two ideas in your head of course. But when it comes to what I focus my attention on. One side has funding and an active branch advocating for their humanity. The other is being systematically oppressed RIGHT NOW by an active miltary force.
>It said they included Holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories with false claims about Jews "controlling" governments and banks, or orchestrating world events.
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>It said that those it tagged as Holocaust denial remained online 80% of the time, while for neo-Nazi content it was 71%.
I'm glad to see they were somewhat specific on the content. On the internet things get muddy and I've been on a forum that was tied to a specific location that was connected to an American politician. For a short while we were inundated with some new accounts there arriving to tell us how outraged they were about this antisemitic politician who as far as I could tell had just criticized Israeli government actions / policies.
It's unfortunate that my first thought was "What what are we talking about exactly here?"
A report came out in the UK claiming widespread anti-semitism on University campuses and made the headlines. They had failed to distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-semitism in the report, which was very disappointing. There certainly was some clear cases of anti-semitism, but they bundled criticism of Israel and accusations of Israel running an apartheid regime as "anti-semitism".
Being Jewish != supporting Israel. I have never been to Israel, I do not identify as Israeli, nor do I support Israel. I fully support a free and independent Palestinian state and believe Israel is commiting genocide. Only 30% of Jews live in Israel and the rest are scattered across the world. Much of the Antisemitism discussed in this article is occuring in America and across Europe. I challenge everyone to seperate these two issues, as public apathy is what fuels further attacks by extremists online and in real life.
I think the real problem here is the tendency that people have to label and categorize everyone and everything.
It's completely wrong to assume that there is a box and everyone in that box shares the exact same attributes. Society even tries to convince and manipulate people into adopting behaviors and values which are not their own; just so that they could 'fit in' (in the box). This is the root of 'peer pressure' which I take is a big problem in the US school system (go figure).
Maybe this agenda serves social media and advertising companies (and corporations overall)? It's convenient for advertisers if people in any given category share exactly the same attributes. It seems to be an extension to the goals of the factory model of education; to produce people who are optimized for participating in society whilst questioning things as little as possible.
It's really weird that people think it's the responsibility of these platforms to police their users. Those of you that think it's easy to do, you're very very wrong. Censorship is also a problem and we should be supporting the right of idiots to voice their stupid thoughts so that we have the opportunity to voice our thoughts when others would rather not hear them. That's the whole point of freedom of speech.
??? What idea aren't you buying into? That platforms can't feasibly police their users and that its unreasonable for us to expect them to? Yes, they can get the worst of the worst. They can comply with court orders. But expecting them to censor everything people think is objectionable is not reasonable. Do you want facebook to be the arbiter of what you can and can't say? Because that seems to be what you're asking for. As much as you think what to censor is "obvious", it is very much not obvious.
Anti semitism is unique amongst other forms of racism in that there’s generally little or no action taken, even for blatant displays: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdbHft64/
I'm skeptical of this kind of analysis without concrete examples of the kind of content that wasn't removed. Even if you trust the researchers (I personally am not familiar with them), there are legitimate reasons why they might not categorize things the same way as social media platforms.
e: Turns out that the researchers' full report actually does contain concrete examples, which seem to be legitimately bad and take-down-able.
I think it is dog whistling, but if you aren't familiar with anti-Semitic arguments and angles of attack, I don't think it is clear at all, which is probably the point.
On the surface it just seems like a list of facts and some are even seemingly laudatory, such as helping to end apartheid. The bad stuff is subtle or lower down the page.
If I were a moderator and just doing a quick check, I probably wouldn't spot anything wrong with the page.
The problem is, even if you could develop a moderation system which can give individual reports this level of consideration, I don't think there's anyway to remove this kind of content without also removing a ton of legitimate discussions that happen to be used as dogwhistles in some specific subculture.
> Our researchers reported hundreds of racist anti-Jewish posts to social media firms using their user reporting tools. 84% were not acted upon.
The same social media cartel still housing 'hate' on their platforms with 84% of anti-semitism posts still on their sites! That's not good enough. Even Khomeini is still there violating the 'sloppy Twitter guidelines'.
