The Political Thread

[Hawkmumbler]

It's really freaking important we don't give white supremacists and Nazis (as well as those who appeal to and profit off of them) a platform to share their bile,  but with their alt-right mentality of victim hood and 'displacement' just cutting the cunts out completely, unfortunately, will only give them a great platform in the mainstream media. I don't see there being a way of suffocating these cretins online presence without more shootings as a result.

[Dandontdare]

The tech industry has had a free ride for far too long and needs to be called out for its failings.  Its about time anyone who hosts fora of any kind, social interaction of any type, needs to have a named moderator who is legally answerable for what is posted.

I disagree, because such places are not publishers. Also, if you start arguing moderation people are liable for content posted by others, you open up a can of worms that will ensure forums such as this would immediately cease to operate, and so would the vast majority of social networks.

I'd argue the bigger players need to be much, much better regarding social responsibility and moderation. It's pretty clear Twitter doesn't give much of a shit about racism, for example. Facebook isn't too fussed about women when they're being harassed, and yet the site has a really random touch regarding banning. This is what happens when social networks are all run by rich white conservatives.

On this place, I hope we get the balance right. This forum has the lightest-touch moderation of any I've been involved with that has more than the tiniest amount of traffic. But most of the admins aren't Rebellion staff – we just help out. If the day comes when someone says "Hey, IP: you are legally answerable for what is posted", then fuck that. And even if that's shunted over to 'a' moderator who's staff, that's the day someone's told to hit delete on the folder marked 'forum'.

(In a more general sense, I'm of the oxygen theory — when you stop talking about people, they do eventually fuck off. See: Yiannopoulos.)

Absolutely agree, there must be a distinction between service provider, platform, publisher etc, but what that should be legally is uncharted territory - the can of worms is open - the law, regulation and generally accepted attitudes are racing to keep up with developments, and lagging way behind.

As for this place, it is an oasis of generally well mannered and lightly moderated sanity in a sea of batshit craziness, and for that our volunteer mods deserve our thanks.

I've been knocking around here for 11 years now, and I can only think of 3 boarders who I'm sad were banned, but the mods were left with little choice; and only one that I feel was too harsh. Trolls are ignored, bullshitters are quickly shut down, and the general community is quick to chime up if someone's just being a bit of a dick that day.

[Frank]

Richard Bacon, of all people, explained how social media worked in a way that opened my eyes. YOU are the publisher, now.

Every time your thumbs bash out some nonsense while waiting for the kettle to boil, you assume the same responsibilities that once fell on the heads of billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch and fascist sympathiser (the late) Viscount Rothermere.

I'm in favour of massively expanding the role of Ofcom to treat everyone in the same way as Sky News* because the last decade's infinite amount of monkeys/typewriters has caused incalculable damage to our public life and our democracy.


* If you're not at least fact-checking what you post and citing sources, you need to go into Read-Only mode and let the adults in the room educate you. If you're not running everything you post past an internal editorial committee for signs of bias, you need to ask yourself why. And for the love of Jeebus, employ an internal sub-editor to check for spellnig and the grammars.

[Professor Bear]

You are a publisher on social media only in the sense that an Uber driver is a small business owner - as a social media user, you provide free labor and content for corporations to exploit, but you see no reward beyond social media's virtual currency: attention.  cHEck oUT mY insTAgRaM

[The Legendary Shark]

I think that free speech is vital. It means I can talk about babies starving to death in Yemen and our government tacitly supporting that by not raising all kinds of Hell about it and by allowing Made in GB weapons to be sold to Saudi Arabia, the perpetrator of this vile state of affairs (amongst others, such as beheading people for homosexuality).

The dark side of free speech is obvious - but speech is not action. If I were to call for others to perform some criminal act then that would be deplorable and I'd deserve to be banned from whatever privately owned forum I used to spread that call and maybe even prosecuted alongside anybody dumb enough to do my bidding.

Individual platforms are free to ban whomever they like. A judge, whose name I can't recall, once said that anyone was free to make any argument they wanted in their court and be given a fair hearing, but that doesn't mean they can come into his home and expect the same treatment. Speech is only as free as a particular forum allows.

The danger is that governments complicit in atrocities (which is just about all of them) will use the relatively few terrible incitements to institute blanket bans on free speech all over the net, with the "side effect" of throwing the starving babies out with the bathwater.

We are all responsible for our own words and actions, and that - in my view - has to be the bottom line. Yes, it's dangerous to let some tub-thumping nutter call for unlawful activity in public (where they can at least be contradicted, argued with and laughed down) - but to drive them underground to preach to their own twisted choir in private is even worse.

All personal freedoms are indivisible from personal responsibilities, and freedom of speech is no different.

[Frank]

Yes, it's dangerous to let some tub-thumping nutter call for unlawful activity in public (where they can at least be contradicted, argued with and laughed down) - but to drive them underground to preach to their own twisted choir in private is even worse.

That's probably where we're headed anyway. Zuckerberg's getting out of the troublesome role of pseudo-publisher* and concentrating on the small, private, encrypted networks ideal for organising family meet-ups or terrorist cells (see previous).

That doubles down on the threats to our democracy with which we all became familiar in 2016, when political organisations targeted us with ads specifically tailored to exploit our individual psychological weaknesses, which nobody else could see.


* The idea of The Internet as a public space might soon be over in the same way the idea of it as a bunch of websites and blogs belongs in the nineties and early oughts.

[The Legendary Shark]

There's already a privacy aspect (emails, private chat rooms and so on) and I think that's important too. I like my privacy as much as I like my public loudmouthery.

Facebook's and Youtube's algorithms may not be perfect in burying certain things yet but they're getting there. These censorship tools are part of their drives to become state-sponsored monopolies, with places like China serving as ideal test beds.

[Tjm86]

The tech industry has had a free ride for far too long and needs to be called out for its failings.  Its about time anyone who hosts fora of any kind, social interaction of any type, needs to have a named moderator who is legally answerable for what is posted.

I disagree, because such places are not publishers. Also, if you start arguing moderation people are liable for content posted by others, you open up a can of worms that will ensure forums such as this would immediately cease to operate, and so would the vast majority of social networks.

I'd argue the bigger players need to be much, much better regarding social responsibility and moderation.

Fair point.  For me the problem is that the current situation is normalising this sort of behaviour and it does feel a little like it has had dangerously corrosive social and political consequences.  It does also appear that there is an overspill from the virtual to the real and it is not just 'nutters'.  Take the Trump visit for instance.  The Trump supporter that was surrounded by demonstrators including the one screaming 'nazi' in their face?

Right now things are insanely dangerous.  It might be that drawing parallels with Weimar Germany for instance is alarmist but then again that is surely the key point, unless we admit to the most dangerous possibilities we expose ourselves to that risk.  So perhaps it is worth considering the most extreme responses to this problem and how we find a more moderate solution?  Preferably before the extremists do it for us?

[The Legendary Shark]

Yes, I think that's right. Consider everything because, by so doing, reasonable solutions will probably emerge. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

[sheridan]

Undecided exactly where I stand, but I'll throw this familiar quote into the mix:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

[TordelBack]

Working with a Trump voter at the mo, and if he's typical you can forget rational discussion or common ground.

He's from Leitrim, lived and worked in London forvyears, then Queens for a decade, became an American citizen, now back living in Ireland. His brother and family still lives in NY, his sister in Derry. He gets his dentistry done on the NHS  (no idea).

First thing he says about Trump, having established I'm not a fan and therefore 'must follow the media':

"He's sorting out the immigrants, people have had enough of immigrants. Best thing that happened to the the States since Kennedy".

On Varadkar: "another immigrant, all he cares about is the gays, they'll never have kids so they don't care about the place filling up with immigrants".

On Ireland and Brexit: "This is an emigrant country, not an immigrant one - the Brits have that right. Getting the Border back is a good thing, no-one wants unionists all over the place".

On Bertie Ahern:
"He was a crook, but he did a good job".

I'd known him 5 minutes by this point. Find me some common ground, or even a shred of self-awareness please.

[TordelBack]

Oh, he's just pursued and stamped on a field mouse. I think our relationship is unfixable.

[Jim_Campbell]

Oh, he's just pursued and stamped on a field mouse. I think our relationship is unfixable.

Kill him. Hide the body. If you need an alibi, you were with me all day. :-)

[The Legendary Shark]

I'm with Jim on this one.

[Professor Bear]

It might be that drawing parallels with Weimar Germany for instance is alarmist but then again that is surely the key point, unless we admit to the most dangerous possibilities we expose ourselves to that risk.

Yes some people goose-step down the street wearing actual Nazi armbands and chanting that "jews will not replace us", but to call them Nazis is uncivil - and besides, who else is going to take care of the socialists for us?  Let them get rid of the Communists, later we'll be able to control them.

(copied and pasted from my column in this week's Observer)