"Dissenter" browser addon puts a bigoted, alt-right comment box on every webpage
110 replies, posted
tbh it's better for these people to not congregate and communicate with each other but I think we're powerless to stop that sort of behavior. This may fracture the ability of the FBI to track far right extremists if there's not a single domain they can crawl to investigate threatening comments, unless this app exposes some sort of API that makes it easy to crawl comments
I like the functionality of this:
It's convenient because you don't have to hop between services (FP, Discord, etc) to discuss something, and it allows for easy discussion of things that don't have comment sections on the website.
Separate from the context of being a "bigoted alt-right comment box", this is pretty neat.
What makes the add-on bad is that it specifically targets alt-right people and surely cannot actually make good on the claim that it's 'anti-moderation', illegal or not. Sooner or later someone is gonna say something illegal on it and one of two things will happen:
They don't remove it out of principle so now they're promoting actual illegal behavior;
They do remove it, thus proving they can arbitrarily delete comments at will.
There's a reason why platforms like twitter, facebook and youtube "try" to moderate their content and it's only to stay on the right side of the law, nothing else.
They never said they'd allow illegal content though.
Sounds like you're holding them to a wholly imagined principle as opposed to any they've professed
I'm implying that they'll more likely than not have a different definition of what's legal and what's not, and I'm very doubtful that's gonna include hate speech because the whole premise for their add-on is bypassing moderation on websites in the first place. The whole point of making the media the enemy of the people is to normalize the thought that hate speech isn't actually hate speech.
I wonder if here is a discussion going on in this plugin on this thread right now...
anyone that's alt right and uses dissenter is a genuine cuck lmao, they'd literally get off on talking shit about people that don't even know they exist
Whom, specifically? Because the bar for that is extremely low these days. I've been called a fascist here on this form for making the same points i'm making here, because somehow we've come to the point where advocating for free expression is "Far right", despite the fascist's entire foundational premise being a forcibly "curated public morality", which is the conceptual antithisis of the sovreign individual.
And frankly, nazis have rights too. Short of incitement to violence/comitting crimes, all expression should be allowed. Were this the Mcarthy era, i'd be championing the rights of communists to be idiots without fear of oppression too. Nazi, fascist, communist, islamist, anarchist or civilized human being we all share the moral franchise, even if all of those groups (barring the anarchists mostly) seek to reverse that.
I have enough faith in people's reason that i do not fear bad ideas, because they suck. But i do greatly fear the consequences of forcibly suppressing those ideas, and the people who hold them. And i think that the increasing fashionability of doing so is what's driving this phenomina of polarization and increased radicalization. I mean for fucks sake, this entire conversation is about how hypothetically, people who've been cast out are putting together their own conversation space because everyone else refuses to talk, is proof enough of that. And there's plenty of tales of entire KKK or neo-nazi chapters being dissolved because one black guy wandered up to a few and started to chat. And even if you still believe that suppression is the surefire cure, all the eras in which these ideas flourished were not halcyon days of diologue and oppenness, but of forced suppression by the reigning orders, and a sizeable force of people being driven out from the center, until nothing but that purity spiralling core remained and was torn down by the hordes, radicalized not by choice, but by having no alterior options, and submitting to the groupthink. Let debate flourish healthily, and the bad ideas will shrivel and die, while giving any legitimate concerns territorry to develop and be constructively expressed. It's either that, or a weimar republic/spain style feedback loop that ends in terror and god knows what else. There are no other options.
Styxhexenhammer666, the Holocaust 'revisionist'
This was not your point. Your point was that it's nonsense for Gab to be labeled alt-right, even though they're clearly seeking to be associated with the alt-right. While this rant isn't out of place given the topic, it is a complete non-sequitur to our conversation
And I seriously take issue with this, "even if you still believe that suppression is the surefire cure"??? When have I ever said that it is!?? You're going to tell me about false labels on others and give me this shit?
You're arguing against an open platform because bad people use it. They have that right to use any platform, and i explained why.
Also i watched some of Styx's videos, dude just seems to be a basic libertarian. If there's footage of him pledging allegiance to the eternal Reich, death to Jews and the glory of the Aryan race, i can't find it.
Where
You talk about respect and engaging one's opinions, then talk over me by making points predicated entirely on your presumptions of what my opinions are, retorts against points I've never made, as if I had made them. Is this respect? Is this engaging with someone? You talk the talk, but you don't walk the walk
https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/951386159472693249
Either your views are more skewed than you believe they are, or libertarians are fucking insane if this is par for the course
You responded against me saying that they and the platform have the right to exist on the grounds of "but look at this bad person here!". Is it unfair of me to presume you're arguing against the points i was making on the grounds of bad people using it.
Also, not defending the claims being made there, but i did see that. Firstly, i tried finding the context for those clips with no such luck. It'd be super easy to trim clips of someone saying "here's the position of X group" and present that as held beliefs. Who knows, i don't because i couldn't find the surrounding contexts because i wasn't watching a few hundredf fifteen minute videos to find it and nowhere that clip shows up provides souces. Secondly, presuming he was making his own point, he wasn't denying the holocaust, merely questioning figures. Thirdly, you can't throw around labels like "he's a nazi!" lightly. Being a nazi is constituted by embracing the political model of fascism (directly opposed to libertarianism in every way, ergo the importance of mentioning that), collectivism and a consequential justification for group based supremecy, and a willful rejection of individualist liberal democracies, mentioned and rejected by name specifically many times over in Musolini's manifesto and Hitler's literature. From the videos of his i watched, i saw not only zero evidence of meeting any of this critera, but active rejection of all three.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO8DMA2lraY
The closest i could find to anything supporting your claims is a video of him critisizing isreal as a state on the grounds of it effectively being an imperialist/colonialist actor in the area. But even if we make drastic unreasonable assumptions, we're still short all three points to describe him as a "neo-nazi".
Don't throw around terms like that so fecklessly for personal convenience, because eventually you'll be devoid of tools with which to accurately describe an actual problem.
I responded to you saying "but everyone goes "Reeeee muh alt-right platform" against gab specifically" by pointing out that yes, that is the demographic they're pandering to. I wouldn't call the discussion you just had, with an imaginary version of myself, fair. Maybe within the mold you presumed this argument would fit into, but not by any reasonable standards. What would've been fair, if you really lived by engaging with others respectfully, is to ask what my position is on those issues before delivering some grandiose condemnation of why I, god-king of censorship, will be the death of democracy and liberty itself
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/172/c25b7dbf-5a66-4243-880b-874b43e318b4/image.png
I don't expect you to look through a hundred of his videos, no, though I did find it quickly on page 1 of Google. I can confirm those are his views. If you're interested just google his name + "holocaust" and set search to "videos", I'll reserve my right not to platform nazi propaganda, thanks. Which that video absolutely is, even if - and I'll concede to you on this - Styx is not a "true" nazi himself. Only a far-right, conspiratard, Richard Spencer-endorsed nazi apologist.
In regards to your point that all expression (short of anything directly violent) should be allowed, because"the people will know better," I simply have to disagree.
I point to the antivax community. As a whole for the past few years, we ignored them. We continued research and proove that literally everything they believe is wrong, but it didn't matter. They were free to spread, and they have, like the diseases that are now coming back.
I understand the notion, the nice idea of "let the ideas be free, we will convince them out of it in the end" but its just not working. You cannot argue with conspiracy theorists. There is no free market of ideas with them. To be frank, the only way to contain the harm they do is to restrict them as well.
Not dissing on your whole point of who should choose what ideas are allowed and aren't, and that we can't trust private entities here. But there is a real problem here, and it must be addressed.
I downloaded it yesterday out of curiosity. Either I'm doing something wrong, or the extension is just garbage in and of itself regardless of terrible user base. I straight up can't read comments unless there's over ~50 comments, and even then I can only see the top ~20 rated comments or the latest ~20 comments, there appears to be no way to see all of them.
https://i.imgur.com/KqIqSkS.png
To play the devil's advocate here; I think the revival of the anti-vax movement is largely due to online echo chambers, which Stev did mention briefly.
You're absolutely right, @Stev is selling the "marketplace of ideas" as the natural order which will always ensure that only good ideas thrive. Which is noble and all, but assumes everyone is always rational, and equipped with the knowledge to make the best decision.
In case the miners who voted Trump because he would bring back coal in full force (he didn't) are not proof that the marketplace of ideas is baseless idealism, let's look at the 56% of Brazilian voters who elected Bolsonaro, or the well-documented research on the illogical choices made by people, such as in this study about brand awareness, which shows that consumers will favor familiarity over quality or price (and is itself a replication of another study).
Let's look at the ones I shared last page, first off, this one, showing that an indicator of political differences, even where there is no animosity, prevents people from looking clearly at a subject. Secondly, this other study about how people may perceive counter-evidence to their positions as personal insults. And that's without covering confirmation bias, or sunken cost fallacy, or even getting into the research that is a direct retort to "the marketplace of ideas".
Perhaps most damning of all is the basis on which Stev builds the idea that "bad" opinions will always wither and die: by being publicly dismantled. His dismantling of me calling Styx a neo-nazi was keen and extensive, his dismantling of Styx's holocaust claims was, uh, this:
To call it "lenient" would be putting it very fucking mildly
He said lots of fairly agreeable things in that other rant. But the push for a marketplace approach is blatant. And I'm kinda sad that no one other than you pointed it out.
Please, feel free to point out if you feel that this is my own biases speaking, but my take goes further: the marketplace of ideas is bullshit consistently pushed by people that, like @Stev , wish to give the far-right a pass while operating under the easily agreeable banner of free speech.
You need to open it to see whether there even are comments, right? I had a quick look at the source code a few days ago, they probably can't implement automatic lookup without privacy concerns or blowing up the bandwidth (via colliding hashes/mix access).
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