What is hate speech? Was Charlie Hebdo hate speech? Rushdie? A lot of people certainly think so. I see hate speech across nearly every internet platform including this one. There’s no shortage of hate speech against wealthy people or white men, etc. Is that allowed?
In this case, the entire forum was created to target and harass a specific person. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people / communities.
As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.
Maybe you're okay with a website dedicated to harassing and doxxing specific people. I am not.
Do you agree that Daily Stormer should not have been banned? They were created to opine about white ethno-nationalism, etc. and not to target or doxx or harass specific people. Is your line moving now?
What’s your opinion on sites not targeting specific individuals? Like, “people with Property X have no place in civilized society” where readers of this site occasionally went on killing sprees of people in the category?
The big mistake here is trying to come up with a single code by which to codify speech. I mean, a government (even one supporting free speech) has to do this, because they're the enforcer of last resort, and it's really necessary that such a code promulgated by the government err on the side of being "too permissive".
But-- we should have big markets of many participants who all make their own decisions about what they condone. Then, the individual decisions are not so toxic. And if you are doing something egregious where almost all of them say no, well, you got what you deserved.
My personal thoughts: exposing peoples' personal information for the explicit purpose of severe and illegal harassment is on the "definitely not OK" side of things. Ordinary hate speech that occasionally leads to spree violence is much murkier.
Honestly, it depends on what that property is and if the person went on a killing spree based on their views on property X or for other reasons.
If Property X is something like the color of their skin, their sexuality, their gender, etc, then I would support cloudflare banning them.
I am certainly not the master of what should and should not be on the internet, and neither should cloudflare. As a society, though, there are some things that most can agree on.
There are mechanisms in law for courts to order removal of illegal content. ISPs don't ever have to define "hate speech". Sounds to me want to censor speech you hate.
Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is. The obvious example is child exploitation, are pedophiles rights to swap images of kids currently being "censored as speech YOU hate"?.
Harassment forums like the one in discussion here have no place in civilized society and I am happy for them to be censored. The people that frequent these sites can get together in person and chat about hating all they want, but the method of their harassment (the global platform of the internet) should removed -- insofar as that is possible.
As I was discussing in the previous thread, I disagree with this.
> Someone defines what gets removed. Ideally in a democracy "society" as a whole decides what that is.
Ideally, many smaller elements make their decisions about what speech to promote or convey, and "society" or the "government" is the actor of last resort-- stepping in for the most not-OK stuff when the market has been shown to fail.
Concentrated power is dangerous-- whether it's in the hands of a government or a single overly-powerful commercial actor-- and needs to be restrained one way or another.
> There are threads here where people call for wealthy peoples heads. Did that cross a line? Could we say it about other people?
Are they targeting specific rich people in a dedicated and persistent fashion to the point that said rich persons kill themselves? No, that's not happening. I've seen posts of the type you've described. They're almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned. They're much less frequent than any one of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-jew, or anti-trans comments... which are almost always dead/banned/shadowbanned as well. This site does not remotely compare to KF.
You're falling for the heap paradox: If you remove a grain of sand from a heap, tell precisely at which grain of sand it stops being a heap. You can't? Therefore it's impossible to tell if something is a heap of sand! QED
That just says "don't use the word 'heap' for anything normative", surely not "let's hope what we think is a heap is universal consensus"? I support the current thing though
Society has been doing pretty fine with some fuzziness until now. Sometimes something really goes to far and they end up not hosted anymore. That’s the system working, not it failing to work. Well, that came a bit slowly for kiwifarms sadly but I’m glade sanity prevailed in the end.
If you cannot define a term, you should not use it. I'm surprised that you're so honest about your irrationality, though. Normally, you would "define" hate speech as follows: "Weasel term, weasel term, weasel term" and that would be that.
I would define hate speech as speech that directs hatred at a particular group. For instance, Joe Biden recently gave a state speech (The "Gates of Hell" speech) that was completely choked with hatred for a group. Shrug. I have no interest in banning this, whether from the "president" or from anon. My understanding of Kiwifarms is that they basically just make fun of idiot liberals--a sport on endless grounds.
If you gave your honest definition of hate speech it would likely be "People who disagree with me and make me look bad showing how stupid or wrong I am."
I don't think we should target, harass and doxx people, therefore I do not do those things. That doesn't mean that I think we should censor entire websites because they are sometimes used as platforms to do those kinds of things.
When I visited it, some time ago, it mostly seemed like a lot of angsty teens shitposting.
My thoroughly unscientific analysis of the situation seemed like it was about 98% bullshit posts and maybe 2% of the posts I found truly objectionable (mostly jew/black hate) but not illegal.
I'm not doubting that there is some illegal stuff there, nor that there is some truly vile content, but, I don't even think it's in the majority on a post-level basis.
People calling for my people and my nation to be wiped off the map. (And I don't try to get Hacker News blocked by their ISP or cache provider. I understand that an open forum will have speech like this.)
I'd like to point out that I understand what's "vile" to one person isn't to another. I've had my posts reported as "hate speech" on reddit for saying that "the Fat Acceptance movement is dangerous" and that "Obesity is wrong."
Banned speech should have a very high bar -- direct, specific threats of physical harm.
For the first link at least, they seem to be talking specifically about parts of Palestine occupied in defiance of international law and agreements being returned to them, not Israel broadly being eliminated. Israel/Palestine border disputes are massively controversial, so I don’t dispute people do say things like your summary of the comment, I just don’t believe the comment you posted is that. In fact I think your summary is a bad faith reading of the comment.
Hate speech is clearly defined in various laws against the concept. So it’s not really up to taste. Most popular services attempt to remove hate speech, but doesn’t look like KF does.
Btw, a forum dedicated to the principle and culture of free speech would absolutely (by definition) be promoting/hosting hate speech.
I'm not sure I understand your last sentence? If I were running a forum dedicated to the principle/culture of "free speech" I would think it's especially important to avoid promoting hate speech, or you run the risk that free speech and hate speech become seen as synonymous, and the wider public deciding that free speech isn't a worthy ideal after all.
I ended up conflating hosting and promoting which wasn't clear enough. You would be definitely be hosting hate speech, which is essentially promoting it (by using the internet to make that speech more accessible to others than it would be otherwise).
The alternative is to accept that moderation is NECESSARY for online communities (or else spam and hate speech will take up a huge part of the content and suddenly you'll realize you're essentially promoting this content afterall) and moderation will always look like the opposite of "free speech".
