Far Right Subreddits banned, Youtube bans several people for Hate Speech

Reddit has banned several subreddits. After quarantining places like The_Donald, Reddit finally decided to take it one step further, and outright banning them. Gender Critical has also been banned.

On YouTube, several prominent Far-Right activists have been banned too, these include Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer.

Fake Edit: Upon searching for links. It seems Chapo Trap House has been banned as well (the left wing version of The_Donald)

My take:

This brings us to the topic of free speech. It is actually an extremely difficult topic to discuss and get right, since you have to take MANY things into account. I will put them up in 3 bullet points.

1. First of all, we have the freedoms of individuals who want to host and provide for these services for people.
2. Second is the freedoms of the individual to speak out without fear of getting moderated.
3. Third we have to factor into disruptions and coercion. GamerGate, being the cult that it was, was actively inhibiting the free speech of its enemies. Whether it was through threats or other undermining actions.

As far as I am aware of, The Donald, while being insanely toxic and stupid. Was not particularly obstructive. They were already quarantined, I don't think the ban was necessary.

But this isnt really the destruction of free speech, they don't have legal action taken against them, and there are platforms that uphold the principle of free speech like Parler. They are also free to create their own, and considering how many subreddits were banned, there will be an alternative create if there isnt one out there already.

Just whatever they do, I just hope they wont do anything insanely stupid again, like trying to take away 230 protections, killing free speech for EVERYONE. The best solution might be to try to treat social media like a public utility, but even there are complications in that.

The process of the freest speech is not as simple as a lot of people make it out to be.

I guess this is what we can expect to see? ^_^

A lot of the subreddits that are now banned were small. Or even inactive. But it did total to around 2000 subreddits. And yes, subreddits on the left and right were banned. Including some feminist and LGBTQ subreddits. YT banned 25000 accounts around the same time. And Twitch happened to decide to ban and suspend some big names on the same day. Most of the channels and users that got banned were pretty radical so I think most people would say it's not a big deal. (I do have a differing opinion on that.) But it's important to note that the narrowing bandwidth of our speech is not a partisan concern per se. These corporations are not necessarily (going to be) favouring the truth or your side of an argument. There have already been victims on both sides.

How radical are we allowed to be (or see) and do the people have a say in this? And are these companies allowed to meddle with elections using their powerful influence in and outside of the USA? With a 'democracy' or a republic the power is ultimately in the hands of the representatives voted in by the people. How directly depends on the specific system. And that is not the case when it comes to our speech. Not only is most of our effective speech governed and contextualised by a foreign nation (the USA for those living outside of it), it is not governed by those who have been voted into power by the American people.

As such there is no effective freedom of speech for the people who live in countries where Silicon Valley's platforms are the norm. Only the part where the government cannot directly shut your speech down. I'm not even sure that part of free speech holds up when the governments can, in theory, silence you with the aid of these corporations. Especially now that they seem to be banning in concerted efforts.

We do see the rise of alt-tech like Parler, Gab and Bitchute which sounds great. But there is a concern: They are made out to be conservative or even alt-right platforms of free speech because people think that mostly conservatives are getting banned and start using these platforms. If that is the case, then we'll see multiple platforms where people with opposing opinions or arguments simply do not meet each other. Hence, no mingling of ideas and the polarisation remains. It reminds me of the untenable situation in Belgium where the people are split on many political topics and by a language barrier. Their two biggest parties are considered far-left and far-right and thus they are without an effective government since December 2018. If the people don't learn to talk, I don't know how it will be resolved.

The 230 protections granted to these platforms is an interesting topic in of itself. 230 was put into power because we had a bad situation in law: If an ISP/website/service did not filter content it could be seen as unaware of illegal content posted by third parties, and wasn't held responsible. But if a website or other service wanted to moderate content it would be seen as aware of any illegal content posted by third party and would be treated as the publisher/speaker and held responsible for it.

In order to have moderated websites without them being held liable for the posts of their users, 230 was created. And 230 does the following:
Protection for "Good Samaritan" blocking and screening of offensive material
1. Treatment of publisher or speaker
No Provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
2. Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of--
a. Any action voluntarily taken in good faith (good joke) to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; (so anything goes)
b. Any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph 1.

This means that anything that has been granted 230 protections can essentially take away anything they like for whatever reason and will not be held liable. When 90% of your ability to speak and be heard is through these platforms, that becomes a problem. Right now, you're just dead out of luck if a website decides to take away your content even if it doesn't go against any policy or law. They can make up whatever rules they want and proceed to not follow those rules until they decide they don't like someone getting into politics.

My solution was to have 230 exclude moderation protections to the most popular platform of its kind only. That way the most popular platforms would be forced to allow all legal speech as if it were a public square, which in effect is how they are used. And you could still have safe spaces or child friendly services. But I don't think that's ever going to happen. The only reason I am in favour of simply taking down 230 is that despite it being the end of all online services that try to moderate content, it would still be better than the endlessly polarising situation we have today.

I'm constantly debating with myself over "free speech" vs "corporate autonomy".

As far as the bans and stuff go, I'm sort of OK with it. There was a lot of toxic stuff out there on both sides and it sounds like they banned left and right extremists. Like it or not, people read that shit and it influences them a lot.

At the end of the day, it's their company, not mine or yours; and I can still go down on the corner with a sign and say that "God hates _" without fear of being arrested (not that I'd do that in a million years, mind you).

Honestly, good! People like David Duke, Stefan Molyneaux, and Richard Spencer practically encourage toxic and dangerous behavior. Freedom of speech should never equal freedom from consequence.

eh it doesn't. Nonetheless, this isn't really about free speech.

It does seem very suspicious doesnt it? Due to the age of a lot of them, I suppose they had been blacklisted a while back. And tech giants only waited for the perfect opportunity to deal with them... permanently. A sort of a domino effect. Still the timing seemed extremely convenient. Had there been a blacklist for a while, and only recently they decided to act upon it?

I don't care so much about sides, as much I care about intellectual honesty. The idea of having sides, people are willing to defend no matter what, leads to people defending intellectually indefensible positions. Like Alternative Medicine on the Left or Race Realism on the right.

Free speech is still the norm in places where facebook and the likes are popular. Twitter doesnt ban people from using alternatives, and thus I see no free speech violation.

Parler from what I hear has an issue of banning Left-wingers, which has vastly discredited the site as far as free speech is concerned. That said, with or without alt-Tech companies, there would still be no dicourse. Due to algorithms and sub-reddits, most people ended up forming little ponds anyways. I do agree that further division by sites this may end up increasing the ammount of polarization though, since now people will be even more gated, and possibly even identify under whether they use twitter or Parler. But the biggest contributor to this polarization we are seeing is without a doubt algorithms, giving people increasingly radical content.

The 230 protections mean that Website owners wont be held liable by what is posted on them. Moderation is a part of that agreement. To basically protect them against a tidal wave of lawsuits. Nancy Pelosi dislikes the 230 protections because their nature allows people to spread so much misinformation online. Ultimately, 230 protections are a good thing, removing them without replacing them with anything is what I am so vehemently against Trump and Biden wanting to remove them. And believe me, EVERYONE is benefiting from the 230 protections, EVERYONE. The 230 protections allows social media to exist even at all. Without them, everything that hosted user created content would be taken down really fast.

Your solution is interesting but wont really work. It definately will break up monopolies though. But it wouldn't make speech any freer.

Any site that would embrace 0 moderation would quickly form into vigilante mobs and whatnot. Ideologies that thrive on quantity over quality (lots of the online politics) would completely flood the marketplace with dollar store arguments, making it near impossible to have a proper conversation online.

This is why I am ultimately against these bans though. Because they were relegated to their own little part where they wouldn't drown out far more reasonable discussions.

You forgot Twitch banning Trump. I wish Facebook and Twitter grew some balls and banned him as well.

Me too actually, I find myself questioning this a lot lately. I used to be a free speech absolutist, but lately my stance has changed quite a bit. Currently my stance on free speech is the following,

Corporate Autonomy: Corporations are supposed to operate mostly free from government interference.

Free Speech: People should be allowed to say what they want, ideally free from being censored by the government or other private individuals and corporations.

On one hand it does suck that some people had their speech silenced. But on the other hand, I can easily see why things needed to be done, on reddit there was a massive protest, which lead to a lot of places going dark. People of weak ideologies, such as the alt-right. Often rely on quantity of messaging rather than quality arguments. It doesnt take much to dismantle most of the arguments coming out of The_Donald or Carl Benjamin. So instead their strategy is to flood the discussions with bad arguments. This in turn makes it impossible for the rest to have a proper conversation, and ironically enough, free speech with 0 regulations can end up stifling speech, only putting the censorship at the hands of the mob.

Just look at how much of an echo chamber sites that embrace the "free market of ideas" end up being.

Minorities can often end up being unable to speak, due to constant harrassment from non-minority members, which is another thing we have seen happen.

You know what they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If people want to spew hate go for it. They can pay for the platform and hosting services on their own though. They shouldn't expect private companies to allow anything. This is business as usual.

People who are decrying this as an infringement of free speech don't understand how free speech works.

It seems I'm one of the very few who value the ability to speak, and I don't live in the USA. It's very interesting to me. It sounds a lot like China, where many people will tell you that they love having only access to a highly edited version of the news, and with it a false understanding of reality, because it's peaceful that way. There's less conflict and conflicting thoughts. Like literally. Look up conflict on Google and you find very little of it. There's no real discussion because it's all a show. Maybe they have found a way of life in China where truth actually doesn't really matter anymore.

And that's an excellent question to ask. Does the truth still matter? Do we need control over our voices or is it OK to have it all be under corporate control? Are we more free when we worry about reality or is it better to just accept a narrative and live a lie?

And honestly if that's what America wants, then I don't have any good argument against it. Except that I think it's insane and it's a heavy decision that will be made for many people living with you. Not that you had a choice in it, because companies don't have to ask you. But ultimately if it's what you want anyway, then I guess it's OK and I don't really have a say in that, no pun intended.

I wonder one thing, though:

Would you just believe it all? Or would you ignore it all? I guess I would just believe it all, if it were to have complete peace of mind.

@HoolaHoopMan: Yeah. It's no more a violation of free speech than the fact that Rush Limbaugh refuses to have me on his show so I can tell him and his listeners what I think of him.

@KungfuKitten: You can say whatever you want. You just don't have a right to a privately controlled platform.

The issue is that freedom is an idea, a concept, rather than something concrete.

No one here is advocating for more control. Especially not government control. What people are advocating for is that the government doesnt need to step into social media drama, especially not those that are privately owned. Let the free market decide.

But here is the real kicker. The places where free speech is supposedly held the highest, tend to have the least diversity of ideas and opinions, and are most prone to turn into echo-chambers. Why is this? Because all you achieve is replacing a terms of service, with mob rule.

And I would rather have a terms of service to restrict me, than a mob.

Well, did you hear what I just said about my favourite cup of tea? I'm guessing you didn't because I didn't make use of a privately controlled platform.

Exactly. The freedom of speech grants you the right to speak. It doesn't grant you the ability to be heard by the audience of your choosing.

Please someone help the far-right make a digital platform.

I never heard of those people. I'll all for freedom of speech, everything except for the calling of violence. Reddit and YouTube are private businesses though. They can choose what to allow. The only issue I can see with this is that all those people will move somewhere and hide. Yeah, it's great that we won't see them but it could be dangerous to have people spewing hate unchecked. Then again those folks are probably monitored by governments anyway.

So long as platforms for true free speech such as chan boards stay open and are allowed to remain in place, no one should be obligated to use their company's website to host toxic trash that will lose them money. If the right doesn't want to get banned from regular discourse, maybe they shouldn't breed cultures of racism and hatred?

It doesn't allow me to effectively have a voice in this world. A voice without an audience isn't much.

No it doesn't. You need enough money (or sponsorship by someone with enough money) to afford a microphone.

You expect free speech on a private platform? Idiot.

But you know their supporters will assure it is.

Plenty of platforms do offer it.

in the usa. their are 2 types of online people.

normal ones

and

total a holes.

i have a friend that the later and with the covid thing. i know he will get banned for the crap he is saying.

where talking about deporting legal people here and shooting protestors

To me that feels like somebody taking your money and leaving you with a penny. And you'd ask "Why did you take my money?" and they say "I didn't take your money. You still have a penny."

I suppose in this case, legally, that money or that voice wasn't yours to begin with. So nothing of value lost, really. Enjoy your utopia.

It's certainly not my utopia. I hate the current situation which stipulates that money = speech, but that's how we've defined freedom of speech in this country at the Constitutional level. The small guys get drowned out by the people with all the cash who hold all the influence.

"Learn to code"

There's two high level standards I can see here.

1) All people should have an equal net 'free speech' ability

2) All people should have a standard base for 'free speech' ability

Number 1 is futile to fight, as there is no way to ensure someone like Elon Musk would have no more 'free speech' capability than your average homeless crack head (ignoring there is no feasible metric with which to measure). However, number 2 can be enshrined in certain standards that apply to public property demonstrations, town halls & government Q/A, political donation limits (if enforced), and private property and ownership rights. You can obviously argue that number 2 is hard to capture, but it stands to reason that portions are easily adopted and applied. The people that are arguing for some standard of free speech that incorporates private ownership and media platform use have no idea what that would entail.

Up next: The Susan G. Komen foundation is forced to run ads for pro breast cancer enthusiasts!

They already have Twitter and Facebook.

Sorry sport, free speech doesn’t apply to private business. And far right crap and lies need to be banned.

A new platform is on the rise, called Parler. Ted Cruz is moving to it as well.

Nobody still knows why Dr. Disrespect was banned.

Why should I defend the free speech of those who, if they had the power, would enact far worse restrictions and bring upon a worse outcome for the vulnerable that they attack?

Why should I defend the free speech of those who constantly attack others, actively and indirectly encourage violence, and when violence is committed against the others?

Remember when censorship was a fascist thing?

eh. i don't see it happening. like him or not, he makes money for them.

@phbz: No. The Far Right needs to silenced.

They can spew their shenanigans on 4chan or voat. Private companies can control their content via a Terms of Use much like here at Gamespot. If they don't like it, don't use it.

Facebook and Twitter are fairly different in a manner that the courts believe they rise to a level of a public forum when it comes to officials.

Remember when people knew what censorship actually was?

Again, why should I defend the speech of those who, if placed in power, would implement the same censorship rules as well as other harmful policies against the vulnerable groups that they attack?

If a neo-Nazi complained about how they're being silenced for their views, and their views involve killing minorities, Holocaust denial, and other prejudiced beliefs, why should I defend him/her?

If a political candidate goes on rambling about how Mexicans are rapists and encourages his supporters to be violent towards his opponents and do it, why should his speech be defended? Especially when there have been an uptick of violence against the minority groups he attacks by his supporters.

Free speech is a double-edged sword where the worst of individuals take advantage of the principled, take power to their own hands, and would eliminate free speech, as well as other freedoms that we take for granted.

But that's okay. At least the principled can say, "we stuck to our principles" while losing sight on everything else.

Hate speech is completely arbitrary. Never trust this phrase.

Private companies do not have to allow whatever on their site. Last I checked the government wasn't arresting your for you words so no censorship here.

Then you're simply applying a negative connotation to censorship across the board. By this measure a billboard company that denies KKK officials from using their physical space to put up 'Death to Jews' graphics on their signs is in this same bucket.

Their restrictive policy to deny advertising coverage is censorship. Which, if we're also under the assumption that censorship=bad, follows that denying the KKK air time will result in you 'being on the wrong side of history'.

And private entities do not have to give you a space to voice your opinion. Period.

Why worry about foreign interference in elections when there’s more effective homegrown interference?

The Left are evil.

The left are evil because they don't like election interference?