> The 2017 white supremacist rally Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Virginia was planned through Discord, and the platform was used by far-right mass shooters in the 2022 Buffalo shooting and the Highland Park Parade shooting.

It's just free association untethered from the costs of physically finding your associates. During the 2020 BLM protests I found myself in a large Telegram groupchat of protest organizers. The organizers could have done the same thing in a person's house or a community center but it's cheaper and easier to do this in a groupchat.

I don't know what anyone can do about it without breaking US Constitutional freedoms or the SCOTUS narrowing the freedoms when applied to digital media (which I think would be a dangerous precedent.) It seems like the physical constraints of association used to have a pretty big hand in shaping 'radical' culture in the past.

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estimator7292 a day ago | parent | next [-]

I am very explicitly not taking a stance either side, but: it's hard to argue that social media and the echo chambers it inevitably creates are extremely dangerous and make individuals much more susceptible to 'radicalization'. This is something we've been talking about and worrying over for years.

These echo chambers can easily motivate people into violence who otherwise wouldn't. The cheapness and ease of forming mass groups to organize such events is also a huge problem. If it weren't so easy to build a group online and you had to do it in person, how many fewer of these groups would form?

How good or bad it is kind of depends on your perspective. For the current government, activists planning protests and organizing to push for government reform or equality or whatever issue, this is an extremely bad and dangerous thing. For a plurality of citizens it's an extremely good and necessary thing. The same applies to hate groups planning mass shootings or whatever. They think it's just and necessary work and some parts of our government would be thrilled to encourage it.

Either way, the current authoritarian regime has a vested interest in shutting down this and other types of free expression and speech and association. Whether that's good or bad remains to be seen. Turns out that human psychology and society are quite complicated and messy.

	▲	Nasrudith 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is frankly an entirely wrongheaded approach to speech, in seeing the reach of speech and ability as a problem. When the entire point of speech is to reach people and influence them. That is exactly what speech is supposed to do. It isn't a good thing to 'moderate' the reach of speech. It is supposed to allow organization of mass groups. Trying to divide it into good and bad speech makes even less sense than trying to define good and bad gravity. Control of speech is the One Ring, that governments are always tempted towards, always rationalizing it as the solution to all of their problems, and under no circumstances should be allowed to possess. Of course it is bad in an authoritarian regime! Messy and complicated does not override the overwhelming evidence, it does not in fact remain to be seen.

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lm28469 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> I don't know what anyone can do about it without breaking US Constitutional freedoms

Well that's the thing, these apps can ban whoever they want they're not run by the government. The government cannot force them by law but I'm sure they can be very persuasive, especially given how many bootlickers execs there are

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ChocolateGod a day ago | parent [-]

If these apps have content that is inciting crime (e.g. on both Reddit and Twitch over the last couple weeks I have seen people promoting violence such as killing JK Rowling) then I think the government can force them to act.

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lm28469 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And since they decide what a crime is...

See the recent tweet of trump declaring antifa as a terrorist organization, it's not even an organization to begin with.

	▲	ChocolateGod 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm pretty sure trying to convince other people to kill someone is widely already considered a crime, regardless of what who or what the target is.

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lyu07282 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its also great because all the regime has to do is to employ agent provocateurs on whatever speech-platforming network they want to shut down and people like you will happily go along with it.

	▲	amenhotep 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think it even needs to be that organised; the extremely online right wing love that kind of thing and would probably do it entirely organically.