It’s not a thought stopping cliche, because it’s true. You can’t tolerate ALL forms of speech in a society - the fire in a crowded theatre is another ‘cliche’ but shows there are forms of speech that must be controlled. Hate speech is one of those, violent speech is another. If you do tolerate them, it eventually destroys the society. He got it from Plato, it’s not a new shiny radical idea.
If you think defending Nazis is a ‘cool’ thing to do, however much on the fence about liberal/libertarian ‘protection’ of free speech and such hand-wringing arguments, however much you might hate corps etc, then you deserve what happens to you. And what will happen to you is the fascists will use your prevarication, seize power, and thank you by throwing you in a gas chamber. (I’m glad Godwins has been thrown out, that was another ‘thought stopping cliche’ but it was rather more effective than the paradox at stopping genuine criticism on the Net, and to paraphrase Oliver and Hardy, that’s how we got in this damn fine mess in the first place).
Real politics, rather than the politics of sitting on the fence and treating these as Ivory Tower hypothetical cases. is sharp and dangerous. Even the slightest help or lack of critique of these people counts as support in their eyes, and promotion of their ideologue. Please don’t confuse the two.
And if EFF and Boing Boing start seriously defending Nazis, fascists, White Supremacists et al on these terms, then I will have to part as a very long time supporter and reader…good luck defending fascists, they will thank you in ways you really don’t want.
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You bet that? How much do you bet that. I’d put down $100 that the next website to be deemed unhostable by these companies is not a BDS website. I feel like you should be asking for odds.
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I am. I can vote a government out—say what you will about Trump but come 2020 at the latest, he is leaving the White House. In extremis I can move to a country whose laws are more to my liking or whose government I find less objectionable.
What do you do to get rid of Google? Or to get away from it?
The question, I reiterate, isn’t whether threats, organizing for violence, &c ought to be controlled. The question is who. And I cannot accept the delegation of this task to people accountable to precisely nobody.
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I’ll simply reiterate that the Slippery Slope Fallacy is a fallacy because it supposes because A is similar to B, then B will lead to C when C has nothing to do with A. It assumes that removing hate speech will lead to removing speech that is not hate speech.
And blocking/deleting/silencing nazis isn’t a bad thing considering they promote genocide. Unless you defend their right to do so, then your speech is sacred and holy, and anyone who speaks out against you should be silenced.
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“So I hear that there’s these guys, Nazis, who are meeting at beer halls around Munich and making noise about exterminating all the Jews like you and me. I’m thinking we should prevent them from gathering at any of the local beer halls to try to quiet that kind of talk any way we can.”
“What? No way! If we stop these Nazis from planning to exterminate us, what’s next? Someone might tell us the Jews can’t have public meetings, either.”
“Yeah, you’re right, we should let them go ahead and plan this Holocaust they’re talking about.”
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I think it’s worth pointing out that the phrase originated in a case targeting leftists:
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The case might have been terrible. But if you willfully yell “fire” in a crowded space and people are injured frantically trying to escape, then you ought to be punished for your recklessness/malice.
But I would like it if people used as an example how you can’t say, “I’d gladly have sex with someone for $50.” It turns out the threshold for denying speech is pretty low and doesn’t even have to involve violence or threat. It just has to have an effect that society deems undesirable and the supreme court is fine with it.
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I had never seen nor heard of this before, and I love it. A brilliantly simple summary of a complex topic I’ve been wrestling with. Thank you for posting!
It still uses doublespeak here, they are using examples of when Facebook encouraged community reporting for abusive profiles and then groups immediately used those community reporting rules to censor pages (like atheist Arabs seeking separation from church and state) to show how Facebook decided to censor speech when it’s the attitude of algorithmic abuse reporting and strike down first and then restore if things are OK that’s the problem. Same issues are seen when patent trolls and the like strike down YouTube parody or cover songs, it’s the actual removal of curation that is the problem - and that complete removal of curation has created massive problems whose solution is not “ignore it.” I mean, those algorithms are why streaming video took over pre-recorded video and it’s now why Twitch’s IRL tag had led to a huge rise in organized harassment campaigns where people go live only to speak against another streaming performing and then send a legion to harass them and follow them on social media where more algorithms over curation means that harassment doesn’t go away.
Meanwhile, the examples they give of upstream censorship is because a complete lack of government involvement in how the internet infrastructure works. The entire thing is a house of cards that can be abused by other large institutions against risk-adverse companies. And then they follow it up with how government involvement makes the situation worse, using the private technology companies’ transparency reports showing authoritarian governments (including our own) trying to censor people on social media platforms.
There are direct contradiction to the logic the EFF is using, and they are not addressing the widespread abuse of civil liberties because this is a complicated issue. And the EFF has always taken the stance of magical solutions to harassment - saying they are against laws limiting speech, for laws limiting harassing speech, the over enforcement of harassment laws, the under enforcement of harassment laws, against private companies moderating harassment, but for private companies making moderation easier. They don’t even attempt to address organized harassment at all, because it is literally impossible without catching fringe innocents in the nets.
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