Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

I'm not really sure why exactly. I suspect it has to do with having a NSFW tag on my account (that I didn't put there) that I'm afraid to turn off, because of the warning that's next to that button and it doesn't explain what "swearing" is exactly and if I turn it off and write "fuck" I might get banned.

My account provides a lot of help to other people, it's highly valued by the community, I have loads of karma, I've paid for quite a bit of server time by the rewards I've received.

But you can't search on my username, it won't show up (not even if you have NSFW visibility turned on).

I'm not about politics, or covid or any hate stuff. I'm just there to try and help people with depression, anxiety and other issues. And I'm being censored for some reason.

So whatever they're doing, it's guaranteed to overreach and it's counter productive and who knows how much damage it does to society as a whole.

It's just that no one knows the severity of the damage the censorship does.

The goal of the platform is to pull in more users. Having less abusive language and users is a means to that end, as is appeasing general public outcries for more moderation.

The goal of the public and lawmakers is, hopefully, more effective and meaningful discourse.

The paper you link measure for the prior outcome, not the latter.

Edit: Just to comment on the outcome you are referring to though, I don't believe the bans actually lead to more meaningful and effective discourse on Reddit. I don't even thing it lead to more civil discourse. You can click on literally any politically sensitive topic on the front page and you'll find that almost all the top comments both lean in a specific direction (diversity of discourse is terrible) and the deride anyone who disagrees. Maybe they use the 'F' word less, and no one is using the 'N' word anymore, but it is very obvious that it has become a strongly homogenized platform that doesn't welcome nuanced opinions.

If the real objective should be a global decrease in hate, then maybe local suppression/exile might not be the right mechanism.

This paper is trash. On defining hate speech, "we focus on textual content that is distinctively characteristic of these forums", so, yes, banning specific subreddits resulted in less of that content in the overall Reddit. Did it make Reddit a more friendly place? Probably not as tensions have never been higher.

That's like saying banning smoking in the park reduces smoking because nobody's smoking in the park any more.

what they did was create a lexicon of hate speech terms from two large subs that were banned. they then counted the frequency of those terms in other subs after the ban. they found that usage of those terms dropped substantially, and concluded that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech.

if you're familiar with the dynamics of these sorts of subs, the problem with this approach should be fairly obvious. these subs tend to develop their own set of specific terms/memes (hate-related or otherwise). it may be the case that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech across the whole site. but it's also possible that the same people are still posting the same stuff coded differently. this study is far from the final word on the matter.

When the status quo is bad, "maybe that won't work" is not an effective argument against taking action anyway if you don't have a better idea. If we don't take action, we already know we're going to (continue to) have a bad result!

Today reddit is even more hateful than before, although that is a subjective meassure, but 5-10 years ago you at least had standards to not wish death on people you disagree with for the most part. There were exceptions, today it is very common.

I would argue the study is wrong.

Having people with bad, hateful ideas out in the open I would argue is preferable to concentrating all these bad thoughts together with people that will reinforce that it is normal.

Which is fine I think, but why have Reddit or FB do the censoring (aside from things that are outright illegal). I don't much care if a bunch of Nazis or tankies are busy planning world domination on Reddit while sharing recipes. Why do you care?

The sentence is incomplete. Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. I don't think that your linked study is really necessary, the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well (to achieve the goal of "preserving Chinese communism") [0]. Imagine if 30 years ago large digital monopolies banned what was considered unmentionable back then. I doubt gay marriage would have been legalised in America. All of the progress that we have in making marijuana more legal would have been terminated by the companies wanting to prevent people advocating illegal drug usage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

According to a single study. In general I don't think it actually does. Making it harder to find is sufficient, banning it outright just proves their point and pulls additional moderates to their cause.

Quite possibly. And we want to put the burden of labor on them to do so, instead of operate in a world where the rule is "Don't use the internet; hackers will steal all your data."

'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But why though? Because they cause harm? Doesn't inciting racial hatred cause harm?

Once we stop arguing over the issue being black/white but instead discuss _where exactly_ we draw the line then I think we are finally having a far more honest discussion. Just because some speech is illegal and other speech isn't illegal shouldn't be the deciding factor on whether someone (or some company) needs to platform that view. That's then leaving it to governments to decide what is ok and what isn't, instead leave it to society to choose not to propogate hateful and distasteful messages.

I also find it frustrating that some armchair psychologists have decided that people like me with more nuanced views simply want to repress and censor things that we disagree with which is not what it's about at all.

Me too. I've always wonders what drives people into the arms of fascists and other such overtly unpleasant belief systems and the simple answer is fear. Fear for yourself, your family, and your future will apparently cause people to abandon all sorts of supposedly cherished beliefs.

This is why I think here in the UK SAGE's SPI-B group using behavioural psychology to increase the perception of personal threat as part of the anti-coronavirus measures was such a dangerous and short-sighted policy. Using fear might be a convenient way to convince people into doing what you want for a while, but fear also drives people into the welcoming arms of all kinds of nasty ideologies. That cat's out of the bag now too, I suspect using fear to "nudge" the public into doing what the government of the day wants will become a much more common feature of liberal democracies in the future now. We've done a deal with the devil and he always collects in the end.

The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution.

Incidentally, what happened to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)? I miss that term, and I think it's much more descriptive of what we're seeing these days than the more vague "misinformation".

A close read of the constitution itself shows that this has been the case since the very founding of the united states.

> The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

The goal of the first amendment is to protect the citizens of America from laws created by congress / government in limiting speech. That is nowhere near what we are talking about when we're talking about _any_ speech conducted on a private platform.

In fact, it's interesting to me that the argument has recently been spun around such that some politicians are claiming that social platforms are violating their first amendment rights by blocking or banning. This has nothing to do with the intent or language of the first amendment.

In my mind, you can be the most fervent civil rights advocate and still believe that Twitter/Facebook/etc can ban anyone they want for any reason. Even more so if you believe in free enterprise and the rights of a business to act in the way that they best see fit.

I understand that platform bans have more implications and repercussions than I'm outlining here in simple terms but still the conflation is frustrating to me.

I think even a government hosted forum could filter content without violating even the spirit of "free speech", and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't legally be considered a violation of the first amendment, even if that filtering reached blatant censorship levels.

Censorship, government or private, is a separate concern from freedom of speech, and using one to make arguments about the other doesn't make any sense to me.

This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual worlds (eg one a future where your favored ideology is not dominant and is in need of the protections you are currently burning down).

The average person is nowhere near smart enough to be able to put these pieces together into a coherent worldview, let alone one that they find more convincing than "they're the enemy, crush them". The periods where liberalism has been resurgent are not ones where the masses are suddenly enlightened, but ones in which they either have little power or are pacified by unrelated conditions. This is not unlike the conditions in which dictatorships are stable, as the common thread is simply "the masses can't or don't care in detail about the fundamentals of the way they're governed". It's not a coincidence that the global illiberalism surge coincides with the rise of universal connectivity: On top of the social and economic upheaval that it induced, suddenly large amounts of people can coordinate epistemically, through hashtags and reshares, without making their way through distribution chokepoints controlled by elites.

[1] I couldn't think of a concise way to phrase this, but I'm referring to the tendency to claim that a big chunk of your beliefs/preferences are incontrovertible and fundamental tenets of society while others' are simply their beliefs and preferences.

It's good to know what people really care about, and what beliefs are negotiable.

Most of these things that aren't a matter of private freedom of association for platform owners tend to eventually get struck down because the Supreme Court can somewhat reliably be counted on to eventually respect the Constitution, but the general public and elected politicians have never supported free speech or free anything. I would say almost the exact opposite of what you said. People only claim to love free speech when something they want to say is unpopular or suppressed. Almost nobody just supports it generally. The ACLU used to be pretty reliable about this, i.e. defending the KKK and Nazis, but I'm not even really sure where they stand any more.

The average citizen doesn't give a crap about any abstract ideals at all. They just want to live their lives and possibly raise a family in an atmosphere not dissonant with their own cultural traditions and beliefs. Allowing people with other traditions and beliefs to spread those via public advocacy, art, or any other means that may lead to them being mainstream or even dominant is antithetical to that.

in government, that means extending federalism: smaller governing bodies loosely federated (primarily for mutual protection and interrelational fairness). in business, it means truly competitive (and fair) markets with diverse participants, not oligarcal ones (like these platforms).

"I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things."

Yes, and worse I feel it's not even that people are all too willing to go along with these things from on high, they want it, they propagate it. I'm starting to see the same behavior and mentality I imagine was common in East German where citizens police other citizens. It's not a good direction we're in at all.