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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7991 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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Censoring journalists to prevent suicides is a fool's errand

In 2015, Scott published a post called "What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?" He described a variety of cognitive-behavioural milestones that might seem innate but in fact have to be consciously learned, examples including "theory of mind" (the understanding that everyone's minds are distinct, and that just because you have access to a piece of information doesn't mean that another person does) and foreign languages (many young children take their native language to be the default, and people speaking foreign languages "really" know the e.g. Japanese word for a thing, but insist on converting them into their own special code before talking about them). He then moves into more controversial and potentially elitist examples of potential milestones, describing his reaction to a piece by Nathan Robinson, in which Robinson acknowledged it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper:

He proposes a bunch of potential counterarguments, then shoots each counterargument down by admitting that the other side would have a symmetrical counterargument of their own: for example, he believes that American Sniper is worse because it's racist and promoting racism is genuinely dangerous to a free society, but then he admits a conservative could say that Fun Home is worse because in their opinion it's homosexuality that's genuinely dangerous to a free society... I’m not sure what I think of this conclusion, but my main response to his article is oh my gosh he gets the thing, where "the thing" is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours. It seems silly when I’m saying it like this, and you should probably just read the article, but I’ve seen so many people who lack this basic mental operation that this immediately endeared him to me.

I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalise a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.

Following Nathan Cofnas's exposé regarding Jason Arday's plagiarism and fabulism, and his subsequent suicide, many are pointing fingers at the media's handling of the case. The more charitable framing holds that Arday was "hounded" to his death by a racist, right-wing harassment campaign; the less charitable framing (furnished by none other than Ibram X. Kendi) claims that the way Arday's story was covered in the press amounts to a modern lynching. Even people who concede that the allegations against Arday were not baseless insist that the amount of coverage he received was massively disproportionate (an opinion I do not share). The good people over at Change.org have a legal solution in mind to prevent future Ardays:

Proposal for Arday’s Law: a limit to articles published on one person within a timeframe.

249 articles were published across 15 major British news outlets in the period between 24th July and the date of his death (14th August). Worryingly, 188 articles were written in the 9 day period between his resignation and his death (5th-14th August). These articles scrutinised every area of Professor Arday's life.

This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame. By doing so, we can ensure that individuals are not subjected to undue public pressure and potential mental anguish caused by excessive media coverage. The government must hold media outlets accountable for their role in amplifying potentially damaging narratives.

3,642 people have signed the petition at the time of writing.

So, guys. Let's walk through this step by step.

How could such a law possibly be enforced? Imagine the UK government has a massive centralised database of every news article published in outlets domiciled within its borders, updated in real time, listing the primary subject of each one. As soon as the number of articles about a particular subject exceeds some threshold (e.g. 80 articles in 7 days), the UK government issues a presumptive gag order against all media outlets warning them not to publish any more articles on this subject until the articles-per-day metric has declined somewhat. Any article published after the threshold was exceeded will be issued a public order demanding the article be taken down. This petition is effectively demanding a nationwide digitised Stasi surveillance body employing dozens if not hundreds of Winston Smiths (not to mention an initial outlay of billions of pounds just to get the news article-crawling infrastructure up and running), all to prevent – I mean, how many people commit suicide in response to "excessive" media coverage every year? Aside from Arday, can you name a single British person meeting that description this year?

And needless to say, this legislation would be utterly pointless for any news story of international interest, as Arday's was. (Arday: "The New York Times and the Atlantic are calling me a plagiarist and a liar." His legal counsel: "True, but we made damn sure the readers of the Daily Record wouldn't hear about it!")

But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.

I know, I know: of the 3,000+ people who signed this petition, most surely have no expectation of any legislation being passed. Signing the petition is just an applause light, a way of saying "I feel sad that Jason Arday killed himself, and wish that he hadn't", with a fig leaf of having Called for Something to Be Done.

But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.

And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?

But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.

And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?

As someone with high imaginative capacity, what's your vision for blocking 'private companies from doing what they want?' How do you thread the needle between not banning/algorithmically deprioritizing people for supporting Trump (sounds good), QAnon, holocaust denial (uh...), kiddie porn? I grant that it's probably feasible to separate out kiddie porn, actual terrorists and criminals from the rest, but you're left with a broad spectrum of shit that most normies just don't want to deal with.

Even themotte has to crack down on holocaust denial, HBD and other topics from time to time. And you're catering to a fairly niche and homogenous population that hasn't managed to muster significant disagreement on a culture war issue outside of the Russo-Ukraine/Iran wars in the last 5 years.

If you want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine on steroids for social media I'm on board, but I doubt most of the people complaining in the 2010s want to see their Fox News talk shows or facebook slop nuked by the FCC of a democratic admin.

How do you thread the needle between not banning/algorithmically deprioritizing people for supporting Trump (sounds good), QAnon, holocaust denial (uh...), kiddie porn? I grant that it's probably feasible to separate out kiddie porn, actual terrorists and criminals from the rest, but you're left with a broad spectrum of shit that most normies just don't want to deal with.

There's long been an argument that social media companies cannot be held legally liable for the content that appears on their sites, as they're just a facilitator, not a publisher: it wouldn't be fair to hold Facebook legally responsible for Rohingya massacres anymore than it would be to hold a telephone company responsible for a bank robbery which was planned over the phone by two of their customers. Fair enough. But if that social media then starts banning people for legally protected speech, they ought to lose this protection: they are explicitly making judgement calls over which content they will and will not host, which is publication.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do know it's not fair that Facebook gets to act like a publisher, but only gets treated like a utility provider in the eyes of the law. Can't have it both ways.

Even themotte has to crack down on holocaust denial, HBD and other topics from time to time.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

But if that social media then starts banning people for legally protected speech, they ought to lose this protection

I don't care about big social medias, but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this. Every half-decent forum has to ban some users: spammers and generally obnoxious.

I wish people were more tolerant to other opinions and more willing to join smaller or federated platforms. In the meantime, we can encourage the latter, even BlueSky. I honestly don't think being heard by everyone is necessary or even reasonable, there are too many people online and some want their echo chambers, but small forums you at least get heard by some, and the best can be amplified; whereas large social medias' ability to promote decent posts (by my standards) are questionable at best.

but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this

I don't think FtttG was saying it ought to be repealed, merely that it ought not to apply to any platforms that censor content on particular topics.

Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.

I agree with the sentiment, but I'm coming around to believing that this would be a tricky law to write. I thought the easy fix would be to have the protections only apply to smaller fora, but then H.L. Mencken rose from the dead and slapped my around with the printed out text of the EU's Digital Services Act.

Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.

Yes, but most old-school Forums - and, of course, subreddits - are modded by volunteer users, not by the domain holder. This would be the equivalent of specific Facebook groups policing themselves, as distinct from Facebook itself stepping in. (I suppose all it would take for even the Motte itself to comply with such a paradigm would be for Zorba to agree not to take any conventional mod actions, and I don't think he makes a habit of it anyway.)

I don't know what the solution is

Banning all social media, obviously!

There is no solution that would work. That is a big reason why the culture war is never ending.

You could argue for nationalization and turning these places into public spaces, but don’t even ask me what the plan for things would be going forward. In fact that’s a conversation currently taking place with OpenAI and Anthropic and if the market rejects them then these entities should become nationalized by the government.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

They ban those people for doing the same «violations» as everyone else. For example someone will post a wrong topic, will get insulted, if he posts back with half the vigor he gets banned and the other one doesn't. They've been doing it to me, I got banned for being right about marriage statistics and posting about a visual novel. Obviously amadan and netstack don't like my views.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

I'm old enough to remember the moratorium on all HBD posts on reddit, which I think never officially ended? It just sputtered out sometime in the last 6 or 7 years as virtually all the anti-HBD people left and the problem solved itself.

As for holocaust denial and Jew skepticism in general, you can ask @SecureSignals if he has more he could say on the topic or if he's been muzzled by the mods.

Ah, by themotte I assumed you were referring to the current iteration, not the subreddit. Obviously Reddit is its own thing.

But this is my point: SecureSignals is free to post here.

100% agree that if FB acts like a publisher then they should be liable like a publisher. And in the past I think they’ve crossed that line.

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