No moderation is still worse. It means that -- especially with 4chans activity-based thread sorting -- the most "engaging" (read: rage-inducing) content gets bubbled up without fail. AND that you can drive away all reasonable people with, e.g. gore or absolutely reprehensible political views. Views that are not only explicitly racist but genocidal. The board is called /pol/, but it doesn't actually discuss politics, it discusses racist or otherwise hateful worldviews. There's no serious policy discussion going on here. Let's not kid ourselves.
I was a regular in 2007-2010 on /g/, /sci/, /mu/ and /fa/. The boards had their share of trolling then, but were mostly alright. I cannot recognize the boards anymore. They are full of vile garbage. Nobody is interested in discussing the interests that the board is there for, they're just posting the most outrageous thing possible. It's slop for the brain just as much as any social media feed is.
Whatever communities I found on 4chan have managed to survive outside of it, and none of us go there anymore. I don't use reddit, but it is still 100x better than 4chan.
Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say things that are against the status quo, but that's a good thing.
>absolutely reprehensible political views
Also known as thoughtcrime
Please, 4chan has always been rife with illegal porn. It's been like that since the beginning. The Fappening and subsequent leaks were driven by 4chan. It's about as moderated as twitter is these days. Let's not white wash the site and pretend that every thread doesn't have multiple people just popping in to call OP or other uses slurs.
> Also known as thoughtcrime
Is conspiracy to commit murder an unfairly persecuted thoughtcrime that we should permit on the off-chance that punishing it would lead to Orwellian outcomes?
I've never seen conspiracy to commit murder of individual people on 4chan. That would violate U.S. law and thus is banned from the site. There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups of people, but while that's totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored, no more than it should be illegal to propose blowing up the sun.
> There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups of people, but while that's totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored
Why should it not be censored? You can go from vague sentiments to active perpetration faster than you might think; look at Rwanda.
Because it doesn't harm anyone. If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide, it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
Anyway, your argument, whether intentionally or not, is a kind of motte-and-bailey fallacy. You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views". In many circles, that description would include views like "Women shouldn't be allowed to play in men's sports" or "Young children shouldn't be allowed to have sex-change surgery". That's the "bailey". But rather than defend that, you fall back to the "motte" of things like conspiracy to commit murder. In some peoples' views, abortion is murder, should we censor talk encouraging abortion? Of course not; that would be me countering your motte-and-bailey with my own motte-and-bailey.
The fact is, private companies shouldn't be allowed to choose what we can talk about. We DO have people allowed to choose that; they're called legislators, and if you dislike the things people are saying on some website, you should take that up with your legislators, not with the website.
> Because it doesn't harm anyone.
Threats don’t harm anyone physically. Similarly, conspiracy to murder isn’t an actual murder until the murder is carried out. Calling for a genocide isn’t an actual genocide, but it’s hard to see what purpose it serves other than being the first step to enacting a genocide. There are plenty of other examples of speech acts rising to the level of criminality that no ordinary person would consider to be Orwellian.
> If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide, it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
By this logic we shouldn’t have any laws, because people will always find a way to circumvent them.
> You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views"
You are quoting a different user. My chief contention is that the sort of material you can find on /pol/ often rises to the level of incitement and that there isn’t anything wrong with prosecuting people for it. The same logic used to justify the criminalization of threats can be used to justify the criminalization of hate speech. The meta then shifts to inventing new or redefining existing categories of violence, sure, but this is just a slippery slope fallacy which assumes that there will be an endless tolerance for bad faith interpretations of an existing law. Outlawing murder has not led to the definition of murder becoming so expansive as to prohibit the general public from discussing the death penalty, for example.
> the criminalization of threats can be used to justify the criminalization of hate speech
This doesn't make sense to me. The reason threats are only illegal when they are "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"[1] is because of 1A.
Hate speech isn't well defined. As the GP stated, some may say that abortion is murder. To others, it is hateful to suggest they don't own their bodies. Same argument can be made for trans, gays, etc.
Disallowing speech like, "Kill all Christians! They're ruining our nation." doesn't incite people to imminent, lawlessness. There is a massive jump mentally the reader must make to transform that statement into action.
Rwanda wasn't well-known for its expansive internet forums. The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors. That no one could easily monitor. If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.
There is a natural human inclination to want to listen to and read the words that you're not allowed to listen to and read. If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
> The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors.
This isn’t true. Radio played a huge role in coordinating mob activity during the Rwandan genocide. Several radio hosts were prosecuted for the role they played in inciting the genocide.
https://unictr.irmct.org/en/news/three-media-leaders-convict...
> If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.
The catharsis of venting about racial minorities doesn’t lessen the inclination to vent about racial minorities, it just creates an hedonic treadmill which rewards further radicalization.
> If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
Can you point out any historical examples of this occurring?
>There's no serious policy discussion going on here.
Presumably leftypol is underrepresented on /pol/ because it's overrepresented everywhere else. Additionally it crucially relies on favorable moderation, so it really opts out on its own.
Reasonable people are boring though. I find the vile people amusing.