This is made of awesome. http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/10/william-shatner-calls-out-reddit-for-racism-and-hate-mongering/
We talked a lot about this on the other thread, but I'm of the school that we should respond to hate speech with more speech. If somebody is acting like a jackass, call them on it, let others know, and have a community response to the speech rather than hiding it.
That fucking thread got bogged down by a misplaced emotional response and people being willfully dense.
Hahahahaha! Micro$oft am I right? OBummer am I right?? Comedy GOLD. And I never answered, BlueJackassalope, because I've no idea what you're talking about. You said teens who say stupid shit on Twitter or Facebook should be punished for the rest of their life, I disagreed.
I read this as "with more hate speech" and about died laughing, because I don't think I've ever heard someone say that particular turn of phrase.
No, you were the one locked into "punishment", you created that particular strawman to address some trauma from your (recent?) past. I was talking about "accountability". But, Here's the deal - if you tweet or post or Facebook something offensive and attach your name to it, you'd best be prepared to deal with it for the rest of your life. Because, as we've seen over and over and over again, the internet doesn't forget. Simple question - How would you protect your imaginary 14 year old from the repercussions of tweeting out a racist tweet?
Right, you want to get into a pedantic slap fight over the word "punishment". I think being 39 years old and being denied a job because of something you said when you were 14 is a "punishment". You call it "accountability". I disagree. Well, now I wish I had never said that.
Hey man, this is your hypothetical - 39 year old man applies for a job. I Google his name and his racist tweets pop up. What are you proposing to make that not happen? Take away his ability to tweet until he is 18? Make it illegal to Google a prospective employee's name?
Man that other thread is so good. I remember reading it and thinking "the only way this thread could be better is if there were two of them."
I don't know why I have to come up with the solution. It's YOUR hypothetical Regardless: if a person repents their previous ignorant childish ways and deletes the Tweet then yay, good for them. If they don't repent but realize their current thoughts will hurt their prospects and deletes the Tweet well, that's their choice.
And thus, your inane bullshit has come full circle. Remember to tip your waitress on the way out everybody.
Censorship usually does wonders for people in marginalized communities. It never turns around and is used to attack them by those in power.
Yeah, the problem, with a place like Reddit, or the Youtube comments section, is paying attention, any attention, to the racist/sexists is exactly what they want. Arguing with the willfully ignorant and intentionally provocative is a losing game. You can't kill what is already dead. Unfortunately, it comes with the territory. It is the lowest hanging fruit for sites like Gawker or Deadspin to aggregate the worst of Reddit or Twitter and make an article about it. Violentacres was such an obvious edge case that it was shocking to the rest of the planet that Reddit didn't do something to avoid being linked to his virulent ugliness. There maybe some mild correctives put in place, but ultimately, those sites (Twitter in particular) cannot police all its users and will probably always have some ugly outliers and have to deal the occasional bout of bad publicity. In the case of FOX News their comments section became so ugly that they shut it down. But, that isn't a super useful example as FOX content isn't driven by its users but is rather a top down marketing arm of the Republican party.
You're being a bit generous to Reddit there BlueJackalope, even a casual reading of its comments uncovers pretty distasteful stuff, which aren't easily dismissed as edge cases. This is because Reddit is structurally built around consensus or, at least, widely popular opinions. Popular comments get voted to the top, unpopular ones get buried where few people read them. So having comments like "prepare for the deluge of dick picture PMs" on posts by women, or 4chan-style "OP is a faggot" comments inexplicably not downvoted to oblivion, or oh-so-ironic racist jokes somewhere near the top, make it hard to argue that there isn't something wrong with whatever passes for Reddit culture.
I'll defer, I don't read it (Reddit) that much I wasn't aware how prevalent the issue was*. I had assumed, given the huge user base, that sexism and racism was background noise (like Youtube) and not a cultural standard. Way to fuck it up Humanity. *EDIT - though I was aware that Violentacre's "jailbait" threads were very popular. I guess I thought he was attracting an audience of diseased fucks, rather than servicing an existing one.
Wait till you see www.reddit.com/r/shitredditsays and the insane amount of insanity. Still, as Lizard King likes to reiterate, there are a lot of subreddits almost entirely free of this stuff. Those are the subreddits I frequent, though I will always be surprised to find the nasty shit leaking across the site as a whole.
But people on their way up from "adorable" will be as confused as people on their way down from "handsome"! Also anyone who didn't know the dictionary defined phrases.
How's that been working out for you? I'm considering adding dictionary functionality to my cuddle-giving thesaurus, and I'd be interested in looking into backrubs as well, if you have any references or reviews.
William Shatner: Sometimes he does cool stuff. Now, if Shatner and Takei would just do a tag-team to make a viral video saying "this shit isn't cool," it might make a teeny tiny dent in the social norm that TOTALLY IRONIC LOL racism and anti-feminism are fun for everyone.
Ultimately my opinion is that complete free expression is something that humanity cannot handle without gradually slipping into more and more chaos and abuse, whatever form it takes. Most any sense of accountability is removed and all human instincts are unfettered. By being in front of a computer screen people instantly feel more powerful and removed from the consequences of their actions, and this has been observed with some of the very first time-sharing college computer networks in the seventies, where some of the students already engaged in loathsome behavior and vandalism. And ultimately, the fact that everyone has a voice produces more and more noise, and you get enormous crowds that are only swayed by emotions and easily manipulated. Although he had some chauvinistic views that have largely fallen out of fashion, something I always think of when looking at controversies like these is the work of a 19th century French scientist/psychologist/philosopher named Gustave LeBon, whose most famous book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind was mandated reading in one of my college courses. In it he was the first to describe many aspects of crowd behavior that felt really relevant to the Internet age, and I came to view the Web 2.0 as the ultimate incarnation of the mob mentality described in the book. According to him, crowds grow increasingly powerful and ultimately cannot control themselves. I am not sure the free-for-all model we currently see is going to subsist forever for this reason in one way or another. I would not be surprised one day to see a return to walled garden types of services that will grow increasingly exclusive between one another, and cliquish. We already see some parts of this with some countries censoring sites or parts of the Internet, and services like Facebook which become giant hubs that gradually become the Internet in the eyes of many people.
So, those of us sitting behind these screens and not engaging in loathsome behavior, are we inhuman, or do we just not exist?
Threw you a like for the thoughtful post, though I'm not sure how much we agree. I don't have a dystopian view of unmoderated speech. Web browsers, social media et al will probably increase both the ability to "mute" unmoderated commentary (for good and ill #epistemic closure) and aggregated moderated commentary will become more valuable. I don't see much of alternative to giving individuals more control over what they see or don't see. Top down (i.e. Legal and Governmental) limits on speech are often too blunt to deal with the nuance of uncomfortable language, to say nothing of what a nightmare enforcement would be.
Of course we all know that anonymity (or not being able to be punched in the face) allows people to run amok with their basest instincts and most vile reactions, and get empowered by them. But his work is quite interesting even today because although it is a philosophical/sociological book and not a how to manual, he showed a great understanding of the power of mobs, and how they could be manipulated, how they were swayed by powerful emotional messages, and how a charismatic figure made them especially vulnerable. It is said that dictators like Hitler and Mussolini all read his works and took perverse inspiration from it. The book was in large part a reaction to the rising movements of socialism, which LeBon saw as a way to dupe crowds and harness their powers. The problem with these systems though, of course, is that whatever the unpopular point of view happens to be gets buried or marginalized into oblivion, which I have seen in any such system and is a cause for great concern. I know it frequently happened to me. It can become so that more or less only one point of view is allowed. If you read Slashdot, which was one of the first sites to implement such a system, you know that to appear in the comments you have to love Linux, hate Microsoft, be a veteran programmer, be a socialist with atheist and libertarian tendencies, fear the police and the state, be for completely unfettered free speech, etc etc...
Another aspect of Freedom of Speech is freedom from speech. If I don't want to listen to you, I don't have too. I don't mind the system Youtube has implemented. Comments that have a certain amount of downvotes are hidden, but you can see that they are hidden and click to view it if you'd like. I don't use Youtube for much beyond music, so usually the clicking on the comment doesn't reveal much more than "Rush is Ghey!" "Katie Perry Rulez, Slayer Droolz!" ect ect ect
What this effectively means though, is that for essentially 98 % of the readers who get the default settings and might not have taken a side yet, the minority viewpoint is silenced. It can frequently get extremely ridiculous and prone to abuse, and even substantiated, well-articulated viewpoints that clash with the most popular viewpoint are done away with. It simply becomes another mean to enforce a mob mentality.
You'll have to show me where someone on Youtube has a "substantiated, well-articulated viewpoint" that has been shouted down. You'll have to show me where someone on Youtube has a "substantiated, well-articulated viewpoint."
On YouTube it's rarer, but I wasn't talking about YouTube, rather most any site with comments that has implemented that features sees that dynamic occur. Slashdot was probably the first popular one to do it, and then later Digg (when it was still popular), and gradually others. It doesn't matter how serious discussion is, ultimately it becomes used by a dominant mob to stifle opposing viewpoints. Ars Technica is an example, on the first page of comments when a topic is even remotely controversial, there is virtually always a particular point of view that is being completely buried, often by 80-90+ downvotes, while the retorts are certainly not any brighter.
