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Facebook bans far right groups

carlitos said:
A quick scan of his Wikipedia page, his associations with far right jerks, and his teaching his girlfriend’s dog to do a Nazi salute.
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Seriously? Do you not understand the joke? Making a cute thing (pug) into a horrible thing (Nazi) is the joke. It's the incongruity that makes the joke. Do you not understand how jokes work? Never heard you call Prince Harry a "douchebag." When the far left has their two minutes of hate you're more than happy to join in.
 
Baylor said:
The argument is more like:

The argument against censorship: These platforms were piggybacked off U.S. taxpayer funded infrastructure. And the technology was built on U.S. taxpayer funded research. So these companies have no right to censor political speech when their companies were built off the backs of the American taxpayer.
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Ahh, yes. It takes a village.

:)
 
Eddie Dane said:
Having consumed lots of Alt-Right media, I can assure you that Dankula's vibe is very, very far removed from anything Nazi.

His typical content was stuff like this, and the pug joke fits right in that style.
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Nazi: extreme right
UKIP: far right

So, how is a candidate for a far-right political party "very, very far removed" from a political party that is only slightly to the right?

eta: a google of "ukip nazi" finds this gem, in which Dankula, on his twitter feed, was promoting a forum on which users were supportive of and apparently linked to American Neo-Nazi groups. Dankula himself had posted ethnic slurs on the site.
 
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Mumbles said:
As much as people maligned it, the study cited here got things absolutely correct - sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, by design, don't merely allow these echo chambers, they funnel people into these chambers. It's not at all difficult to go from some random topic, to Dave Rubin or Sargon of Akkad, to Milo, to Richard Spencer.
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That's the big problem, the "You might like this" algorithms. Automatically suggesting and directing to similar or related content. Great if you're an advertiser looking to generate views, but it's also extremely effective at sucking people into echo chambers. And the white nationalists understand this, and use it to recruit. There is a hell of a lot of borderline white supremacist stuff out there, probably mostly just solo Angry White Men ranting, with some deliberately-created content to take advantage of the algorithms. But there are a whole lot of steps along the way that come up.

I've seen a lot of this kind of thing with my own feeds on Facebook, and particularly Youtube. I look at one video on swords, and soon I have a half-dozen more suggested to me. I look at one music video by a lame Brit-pop band for the Forumvision contest in Community, and I have a bunch of videos for that artist and similar Brit-pop bands popping up.

I click through and watch a few more of those weapon videos, and within a week, there is literally nothing else on my Recommended feed. Not just swords and other medieval weaponry, but historical and modern firearms as well, and a small handful other medieval and historical themed videos.

The Brit-pop stuff stops showing up eventually, because I don't click on any of it, but it takes weeks, or sometimes months, before it disappears entirely. And if I click on just one of them, the number of similar videos showing up in my feed doubles.

I see the same thing on other social media sites. I click one artist whose work I like, or which looks moderately interesting, and suddenly I get a dozen similar artists recommended.

It's not hard to see how someone could be driven farther and farther into right-wing echo chambers by a mechanism originally intended to drive advertising revenues. It may start out comparatively innocuous, just some dudebro semi-humorously ranting about how awful his girlfriend is and how a black woman was given the promotion the dudebro so obviously deserved more than she did; but it quickly snowballs from there into garden-variety anti-feminism and complaints about the "reverse racism" of Affirmative Action; into reactionary "women should be subservient to men", "job-stealing immigrants", and welfare queens"; to "Mexican rapists invading America", "violent black thugs raping white women and murdering police officers", "queers recruiting children", and PUA culture; and ending up in "white genocide" and "forced abortion", various anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, full-on white nationalism, Incelism and violent misogyny, forced-conversion, and "Pizzagate" sexual abuse conspiracy theories.

It's not so much a "slippery slope" as it is a "shoved forcefully in that direction" process.

I've seen too many of my family, and now-former friends and acquaintances, end up down those rabbit holes. I saw it happening in the churches I attended growing up, and I can see it accelerating now as the technology makes it far easier to disseminate propaganda to sympathetic and confused ears.

But in any case, one can simply let autoplay go and quickly end up dealing with some real genocidal ideas.
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Exactly. There's a very good reason that I disabled Autoplay on my web-browser-based Youtube feeds. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off on my Roku Youtube app, so some pretty awful stuff pops up from time to time if I'm not paying attention. And each video that plays counts as a view, and generates recommendations for more similar stuff (fortunately, my Roku Youtube app/account is used primarily for music and My Little Pony fan videos).

These platforms are deliberately designed to create these sorts of echo chambers, because echo chambers drive views very effectively, more so than diversity of content; and these companies care far more about money than they do about their social impact. The only reason they're making any noise about removing the worst of these echo chambers (without changing the mechanism that drives them), is not because of any social "wokeness" or sense of responsibility, but purely out of pragmatic self-interest, to stave off the threat of government regulation such as we already see in Europe.
 
wareyin said:
Nazi: extreme right
UKIP: far right

So, how is a candidate for a far-right political party "very, very far removed" from a political party that is only slightly to the right?

eta: a google of "ukip nazi" finds this gem, in which Dankula, on his twitter feed, was promoting a forum on which users were supportive of and apparently linked to American Neo-Nazi groups. Dankula himself had posted ethnic slurs on the site.
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You totally convinced me bruh. That's it. That nazi doesn't know what's coming.

Resist!
 
psionl0 said:
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However, you are only arguing for this if they set the "correct" policies. In reality, you want to force them to prohibit "incorrect" views from their platforms.
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Keep in mind, this is not your father's/mother's media world. What applied in the past about free speech simply doesn't apply to the propaganda power of social media. That has to be recognized and dealt with.
 
Bouncing Bettys said:
Not to derail this thread any further but I'd be curious to know your thoughts, or anyone's for that matter, on Mark Meechan (CountDankula) attempting to prank his girlfriend by secretly training her pug to do a "Nazi salute" and the resulting arrest and sentencing by the courts.

I appreciate humour and no subject should be off limits. Refreshing to see it from both sides in the political climate we find ourselves in.
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How are we supposed to believe this tripe without a link?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
How are we supposed to believe this tripe without a link?
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OK, couldn't resist the click bait. I fail to see any difference between the command to "shake" and the one to "Sieg Heil!"

But what was the actual charge and conviction and in what country? That I don't want to bother looking up.
 
Baylor said:
You totally convinced me bruh. That's it. That nazi doesn't know what's coming.

Resist!
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Yawn.gif
 
wareyin said:
Nazi: extreme right
UKIP: far right

So, how is a candidate for a far-right political party "very, very far removed" from a political party that is only slightly to the right?

eta: a google of "ukip nazi" finds this gem, in which Dankula, on his twitter feed, was promoting a forum on which users were supportive of and apparently linked to American Neo-Nazi groups. Dankula himself had posted ethnic slurs on the site.
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Very far removed in "vibe" as I said. That is, his media has a completely different atmosphere from anything I have seen in that sphere. His act is steeped in self-deprecating humour. Most Alt-Right YouTubers are desperately shooting for self-importance.

"Nazi" doesn't mean far right. It is the far right of Fascism, itself already an extreme on the far right. it's the far right of the far right of the far right.

As for
in which Dankula, on his twitter feed, was promoting a forum on which users were supportive of and apparently linked to American Neo-Nazi groups.
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Who knows? Did he retweet something he found funny that was retweeted by an account that had far right people on it? The way that sentence is constructed suggests something of that nature. Degrees of seperation and 'apparantly'.
If someone has many hours of content online and media outlets have to dig for stuff like 'he follows X and X has one retweeted Y and Y follows Richard Spencer', to find incriminating associations, it makes me wonder.

Are you yourself not a frequent poster on a "sceptics" forum called international skeptics? Which has several members who regularly promote Alt-Right talking points?

Look, Meechum may be a complete douchenozzle who's a member of a crappy party with a logo that suggests 'discount supermarket', but that doesn't make him a Nazi by a long shot.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Keep in mind, this is not your father's/mother's media world. What applied in the past about free speech simply doesn't apply to the propaganda power of social media. That has to be recognized and dealt with.
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"Recognizing and dealing with" the fact that some recreational drug use is dangerous hasn't been very effective.

Skeptic Ginger said:
OK, couldn't resist the click bait. I fail to see any difference between the command to "shake" and the one to "Sieg Heil!"
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That is the consequence of "recognizing and dealing with the propaganda power of social media". One is cute and the other is a "hate crime".
 
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psionl0 said:
You implied that teaching a pet to sieg heil is only a crime because he appeared on Nazi podcasts and meetings.

That is seriously illogical.
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No, I didn't. I implied that he teached his pet to sieg heil and appeared on Nazi podcasts and meetings because he's a Nazi.
 
uke2se said:
No, I didn't. I implied that he teached his pet to sieg heil and appeared on Nazi podcasts and meetings because he's a Nazi.
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So if somebody is not a Nazi and doesn't appear on Nazi podcasts and meetings then it is ok for them to teach a pet to sieg heil?

I don't see any other reason why you would think his other activities were relevant. It's like saying that a chauvinist should get a tougher penalty for committing rape than a SNAG.
 
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psionl0 said:
So if somebody is not a Nazi and doesn't appear on Nazi podcasts and meetings then it is ok for them to teach a pet to sieg heil?
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Then the "it's a joke" excuse might not ring so hollow.

psionl0 said:
I don't see any other reason why you would think his other activities were relevant. It's like saying that a chauvinist should get a tougher penalty for committing rape than a SNAG.
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I was asked what I thought. I explained what I thought. Apparently the judge thought he was guilty of a hate crime. I don't know Scottish or UK legislation well enough to comment.

For what it's worth, though, most justice systems take intent into account when sentencing. That's what a hate-crime is.
 
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Eddie Dane said:
Who knows? Did he retweet something he found funny that was retweeted by an account that had far right people on it? The way that sentence is constructed suggests something of that nature. Degrees of seperation and 'apparantly'.
If someone has many hours of content online and media outlets have to dig for stuff like 'he follows X and X has one retweeted Y and Y follows Richard Spencer', to find incriminating associations, it makes me wonder.

Are you yourself not a frequent poster on a "sceptics" forum called international skeptics? Which has several members who regularly promote Alt-Right talking points?

Look, Meechum may be a complete douchenozzle who's a member of a crappy party with a logo that suggests 'discount supermarket', but that doesn't make him a Nazi by a long shot.
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You are free to read the linked BBC article, as that might answer your questions. I think the fact that Meechum himself used racial slurs on the forum he was promoting is rather different than me being here arguing against the alt-right/white supremacist posters you are trying to tar everyone here with.
 
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