Here\u2019s\n an easy question \u2013 what\u2019s your view of censorship? If you\u2019re a \nsocialist and a democrat, you\u2019re probably against it. After all, you \nargue, the only really effective way to combat bad ideas is to bring \nthem out in the open and put them up against good ideas, and you can\u2019t \ndo that if the bad ideas aren\u2019t allowed to circulate in the first \nplace.The battle of ideas must be fought in public or it becomes \ntotalitarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So\n how fares this public battle today? Not well, actually. Everyone knows \nthat society has changed rapidly in the last two decades. The \nmass-market passive consumerism of the twentieth century has given way \nto the individualistic, two-way street of the internet. But instead of \nthis opening up debate it seems to have done the opposite. Very few \npeople would include a public political meeting as part of their normal \nweek\u2019s activity. Street-corner debates are a distant memory for the \noldest among us. Now ideas don\u2019t normally challenge each other in large \nopen auditoriums. Instead they exist in largely separate and closed \nworlds where each person sees what they want to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This\n is not to say that the concern over social media echo chambers should \nbe overstated. Social media groups tend to reflect the organic \ncomposition of friendship networks, which don\u2019t typically consist of one\n exclusive type of belief or idea. Sure, you may not be besties with a \nTory, but you probably know one or two, and you may have friends or \nrelatives who think differently from you on a lot of issues. Social \nnetworks are like Venn diagrams, overlapping each other in a \nmulti-dimensional nest. Comfort zones they may be, but most people don\u2019t\n want or expect them to be hermetically sealed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At least, not reasonable people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But\n in the pressured depths of the web where reasonable people don\u2019t go \nthere are unmoderated groups where something quite different is going \non. Here the most one-dimensional views are expressed, and there are no \ndissenting voices to challenge them. Here is where a macabre game of \nDare is played out. Far-right bedroom trolls take over a forum and use \nit as a playground to make violent death threats against black people, \nHispanics, Moslems, Jews, gays or some other minority. It\u2019s just talk at\n first, but the feedback loop ramps it up as each participant tries to \noutdo the last. Finally someone ups the ante to the limit, thereby \nwinning the kudos and respect of all participants. What is this limit? \nCarrying out the death threat in reality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This\n is what is thought to have happened on the 8chan discussion forum prior\n to the shootings in El Paso in August, when 22 people were killed and \n24 injured, and the next day in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were \nshot dead and 27 injured. 8chan was also used by the shooter in April\u2019s \nPoway synagogue shooting in California, and in the mosque massacres of \nChristchurch, New Zealand, in March, where 51 were killed and 49 \ninjured, and where the shooter live-streamed the massacres on Facebook. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s\n take a moment to revisit that ethical question on your view of \ncensorship. Given the track record of 8chan, if it was in your power to \nclose it down by pressing a big Kill button, would you do it? Or would \nyou defend 8chan in the name of free speech, saying as some US \nRepublicans did at the time, that\u2019s the price you pay for liberty? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of\n course there was no shortage of hackers keen to take 8chan down. One \neasy way to do that would have been to launch a Distributed Denial of \nService (DDoS) attack on it by bombarding it with traffic until its \nservers ground to a halt. But this wasn\u2019t possible because the site was \nprotected by online security firm Cloudflare. After the Dayton shootings\n however, the owner of Cloudflare finally pulled the plug, saying: \n\u20188chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate. They have \nproven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple\n tragic deaths\u2019 (BBC News, 5 August \u2013 bbc.in\/2lX1r6T).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
8chan\n duly went offline almost immediately, however its users will certainly \nmigrate to a different forum and continue as before. Even if you agree that \u2018free speech\u2019 has limits and such sites need to be stopped, the question is how. The internet is just too big.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artificial\n Intelligence is held up as the great unbiased censor, the thing that \nmight save society from its own worst nightmares, however the hype \naround AI is a good deal more advanced than the technology itself. AI is\n good in situations with finite options and clear rules, which is why it\n can beat the world\u2019s top game-players. But ask it to make a value \njudgment or an ethical call, and it won\u2019t have a clue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u0395ven so, it\u2019s\n good enough to \u2018benevolently\u2019 censor you. AI manages what you see on \nthe GAFA big four (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), sifting your \ndata to serve up what it thinks you will like and hiding what you won\u2019t.\n That\u2019s why two people doing the same Google search will get different \nresults. Meanwhile YouTube\u2019s algorithms attempt to keep users on-site by\n serving up material on a \u2018same-but-even-more-so\u2019 basis. With an \nestimated 500 hours of material loaded every minute, YouTube can\u2019t \npossibly keep track of its content. Thus, right-wing extremists end up \nbeing offered ever more extreme right-wing material, so that the site \nmay be upping the ante in the same way as 8chan. Some people are \ndemanding that it changes its algorithms in favour of more balance, \nwhile others are calling for it to be shut down altogether (New Scientist<\/em>, 24 August).<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\n is, though, another reason to be highly resistant to any kind of \ncensorship. What if they turn it on us? In China open dissent is \nimpossible. People have to use secretive Virtual Private Networks to \nhide their identity when accessing forbidden western resources like \nWikipedia. No wonder Hong Kongers are fearful. Who\u2019s to say other states\n wouldn\u2019t adopt Chinese tactics if it saved them money and created more \ndocile populations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s\n worrying about certain one-dimensional internet trends and also calls \nfor more censorship is their general intention to disable the human \ncritical faculty. They\u2019re not interested in debate, they are engaged in \nwhiter-than-white brainwashing, and never mind the victims or the \ncollateral damage. In a way that\u2019s the holy grail of capitalism too. It \naims to create the perfect customer, even at the cost of the perfect \nstorm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n PJS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n From Pathfinders<\/a> article in Socialist Standard October 2019<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here\u2019s an easy question \u2013 what\u2019s your view of censorship? If you\u2019re a socialist and a democrat, you\u2019re probably against it. After all, you argue, the only really effective way to combat bad ideas is to bring them out in the open and put them up against good ideas, and you can\u2019t do that if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2730"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2837,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions\/2837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}