{"id":1066,"date":"2019-03-27T03:35:11","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2019-03-27T03:35:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:35:11","slug":"theres-an-easy-solution-to-curbing-hate-online-and-it-has-to-do-with-porn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1066","title":{"rendered":"There’s An Easy Solution To Curbing Hate Online, And It Has To Do With Porn"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the aftermath of violence that left one dead in Charlottesville, VIRGINIA,<\/span> in early August, the web hosting service GoDaddy shut down The Daily Stormer, the white supremacist website that promoted the rally there. Many outlets reacted to the decision with applause, while others posited that\u00a0the decision set a dangerous precedent, threatening the free speech of us all.<\/p>\n

For Lux Alptraum, a sex writer and educator, the decision reinforced a troubling disparity in digital privilege, as she outlined an issue of\u00a0The Lux Letter, her weekly newsletter about sex in the media. As Alptraum wrote,\u00a0censorship has defined the internet whether we realize it or not, and for those who work in sex-related fields, censorship and barriers to entry are the norm rather than highly publicized exceptions. Without enforcing an outright ban on sexual content, web services, search engines, and social media platforms have all targeted the providers of sexual\u00a0content with varying\u00a0degrees of subtlety.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, Sargon of Akkad, an anti-feminist troll who earns\u00a0roughly $8,000 a month on the subscription content website Patreon for posting videos to YouTube that are, by and large, hate-fueled responses to feminism and progressivism, and that encourage anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny.\u00a0Sargon of Akkad, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, recently targeted feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian at her VidCon panel by enlisting enough friends to take up the first three rows of the audience and taunt her for the entirety of the panel. In late June, Mic published a story with a headline about Patreon \u201cinvestigating\u201d Benjamin amid the mountain of evidence of him harassing Sarkeesian. Two hours later, Patreon determined that Benjamin hadn\u2019t violated the funding platform\u2019s code of conduct.<\/p>\n

Even before Charlottesville, I was just wondering, why aren\u2019t we treating hate speech and the alt-right the way that we treat sex?<\/p>\n

The word \u201cinvestigation\u201d comes up a lot when the public outcry against online hate reaches an unavoidable pitch, says Alptraum. Yet it\u2019s misleading, she adds, for web platforms to imply they have to \u201clook into\u201d solutions for addressing the problem of online harassment when they already have the tools at their disposal for excluding participants they deem objectionable. For example,\u00a0sex workers will often see their personal PayPal accounts shut down even if they\u2019re not using them for sex work, says Alptraum. Meanwhile, #twerking is a banned hashtag on Instagram, while the tag #KKK has been used\u00a0nearly 1 million times.<\/p>\n

Then there are the more subtle instances of disapproval. For instance, Lux points to how difficult she has found it \u2014 in her experience \u2014\u00a0to locate a sex educator\u2019s Patreon page through a simple name-based search, while hate groups sometimes rise to the surface of search results with remarkable ease. (She invites readers to try it for themselves on the search tool on Patreon\u2019s site.\u00a0Search for\u00a0Erika Moen, creator of sex education comics, even using her exact name;\u00a0then try\u00a0Sargon of Akkad with even a typo or two.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPatreon [specifically] has these radically different standards for things that are sex-related versus things that are hate-related,\u201d says Alptraum. \u201cEven before Charlottesville, I was just wondering, why aren\u2019t we treating hate speech and the alt-right the way that we treat sex?\u201d<\/p>\n

Most would be surprised to learn the history of this double standard intertwines with the history of online banking. In the early 2000s, a of couple major credit card companies decided to charge higher fees for users working in adult entertainment, deeming the industry as a whole \u201chigh-risk.\u201d This decision had a ripple effect, influencing nearly all other payment processors to follow suit. While higher fees don\u2019t constitute censorship explicitly, they do make it a lot harder to operate once users have been targeted, says Alptraum. To her point, banks could easily categorize hate speech as a high-risk endeavor. Unlike the convoluted, evidence-poor arguments about porn possibly leading to lascivious behavior, there\u2019s a direct connection between hate speech and violence. We know that much from Charlottesville alone.<\/p>\n

Once something\u2019s folded into the mainstream, it\u2019s normalized, and that\u2019s true for both good and bad ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I see people having this moral dilemma about making the internet a more challenging place for people who want to send a message of violence and hate, I think it is worth asking: Why do we view that as something people have more of a right to promote than sexual content?\u201d Alptraum clarifies that while she doesn\u2019t envision a world where there are no restrictions on sexually explicit \u2014 aka hardcore \u2014 content, she does hope our assumptions change about what\u2019s inherently harmful for impressionable young people to see. We\u2019re just now beginning to talk about the radicalization of young American men in the same language we typically reserve for violent extremist groups in far-flung parts of the world, says Alptraum. \u201cIt\u2019s just so interesting to me that when a child sees porn, they\u2019re \u2018ruined for life,\u2019\u201d she says, \u201cbut we\u2019re seeing firsthand young men are being encouraged to commit violent acts against people.\u201d<\/p>\n

This all speaks to a deeper problem in American culture where we often find ourselves more comfortable talking about violence than pleasure. But it doesn\u2019t have to be this way. Once something\u2019s folded into the mainstream, it\u2019s normalized, and that\u2019s true for both good and bad ideas.<\/p>\n

So, how do we disable hate groups without threatening free speech? Treat hate like we treat porn, says Alptraum. This wouldn\u2019t require tech giants to develop any new skills or methods for combing out specific groups of people. Banks stand to make more money leveraging stiff fees on hate-fueled transactions, and tech companies won\u2019t have to worry whether they\u2019ve enabled the next big violent extremist group.<\/p>\n

And to counter the argument that shunning hate groups from mainstream platforms will just inspire new hate-centered websites to pop up in their place, consider the cutback in exposure once neo-Nazi threads aren\u2019t positioned right alongside Photoshop challenges. \u201cUnlike porn,\u201d says Alptraum, \u201cI don\u2019t think most people are going to be readily seeking out information about how white people are superior.\u201d Let\u2019s hope for everyone\u2019s sake that that\u2019s true.
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In the aftermath of violence that left one dead in Charlottesville, VIRGINIA, in early August, the web hosting service GoDaddy shut down The Daily Stormer, the white supremacist website that promoted the rally there. Many outlets reacted to the decision with applause, while others posited that\u00a0the decision set a dangerous precedent, threatening the free speech…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}