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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2940 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 25, 2024

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Let's say that, for whatever reason, A wishes to publicly tweet some extreme hate speech about B. A wants the language used to be effective, i.e. to get as much hate as possible across to B, but A also wants the language used to be safe, i.e. A wants, as much as possible, to minimize any legal risks and preferably any social risks for himself. These desiderata trade off against each other: The maximally effective language would be a "true threat", but this would be entirely unsafe, because true threats aren't protected by any free speech laws.

What are some examples of language that A can use which best balances the competing desiderata of effectiveness and safety?

One idea that's occurred to me is language along the following lines: "If I'm crossing a bridge and see that B is drowning in the river, I will absolutely rescue B — but only after I've made sure any drowning cockroach within a 5 mile radius has been rescued, for though I value B's life, I value those of cockroaches more."

It seems clear that the language used here would be highly effective (A is saying that the life of a merely theoretic cockroach is more important to him than that of A). But it seems that it'd also be reasonably safe, since A did not express any wish for B to die (if anything, A says he will "definitely rescue B", only he needs to prioritize (the lives of cockroaches); perhaps his priorities are screwed up, but it's difficult to imagine legal troubles for having screwed up priorities).

Am I missing something here? Are there even better ways for A to get as much hate publicly across to B without overly exposing himself to legal and/or social risks?

Why would you use a minced oath version of a threat to communicate hate? The entire universe of online threats is fairly ineffective at making B feel bad, regardless of identity of B.

If you're making an effort to make that person feel bad, a much more subtle attack will work more effectively. If you're looking to express hate, satire will be much more effective.

There seem to be different related concepts here that can lead to different methods based on exactly what you mean by "hate". Do you want B to feel maximally unsafe, do you just want them to understand you hate them maximally without them necessarily feeling bad, do you want everyone else watching to think you just got an insane dunk off on them?

Option 1: Probably something that's toeing the line as much as possible to doxxing their information. Like replying to all their tweets with instructions on how to find a celebrity's address or something like that.

Option 2: Figure out some sort of organization that directly opposes their values, like a political thinktank/campaign or even a business they hate, and donate to them a large sum of money, then send this person a picture of the receipt

Option 3: This happens on Twitter all the time.

You forget that the people interpreting whether you've broken any rules are people, not rule-enforcing automatons. They can see what you're trying to do. They could just as easily crack down on you more because they are annoyed by your cynical attempt at rules-lawyering.

I mean, that would be good news from my point of view! After all, I hope it's clear that what's being aimed for here is not an actual "true threat" but something that is just as effective as one in terms of psychological impact on the recipient. After all, someone who actually intends to issue a true threat to someone would simply choose the most direct language ("I will do X unless you do/stop doing Y") available. There's no reason for such a person to care about "plausible deniability".

So if the people who interpret the rules can "see what I'm doing", they should rationally decline to "crack down on me" (at all, much less "more"), because they can see no "true threat" is intended, only a very hateful message.

(Think of it this way. When someone becomes notorious for some controversial political position we often hear their claims to receive "death threats" in the mail or via phone. We all know that the vast majority of people sending such messages do not actually intend to make good on their threats, yet by wording their messages in the outward form of a "true threat" they make themselves vulnerable to criminal prosecution. They merely want to say something very hateful, very violent towards the recipient.)

I think in this instance the "cracking down" is social sanctions (moderators and other people), not legal sanctions. Your OP writes "legal and/or social risks" as if they are similar.

Your trick works well to evade the law and the poster replying to you was saying that this might lead to even more social sanctions. The less your messaging looks like a legal threat, the more it looks like hate speech, which you correctly note is clear to everyone involved.

I think something you might be missing -- or maybe I am -- is that moderation on most platforms doesn't protect hate speech. And committing hate speech is a big social risk everywhere, even if it isn't a legal risk.

Is the point to make B feel bad, or to communicate to them your own hatred of them? If the former, why rely on speech at all? If the latter, well, why bother?

If the point is to inform them that you hate them, I think the best way to do so would probably be to send them a video of yourself ranting about your hatred of them in a state of totally unhinged fury. Really go all out with pulsing veins, clenched teeth, and a beet-red face, and you'll communicate your hatred just fine without any need to rely on wordplay.

wants the language used to be effective, i.e. to get as much hate as possible across to B,

This is completely wrong. Do you talk to cockroaches? Do you care that they understand how much you hate them?
The point of hateful speech about cockroaches is to convince other people to chip in for an exterminator visit, not to make the cockroach feel bad.

If you hate someone that much, you shouldn't be talking to them at all. You should be sending evidence he's an embezzling pedophile to his boss/wife/landlord.

At the very least you should be leaving no identifiable public evidence that you hate someone.

Why do you need the caveat? “You’re worth less than a cockroach” is more straightforward, a stronger sentiment, and still not a True Threat. I’m not seeing what the extra cruft adds.

You will never avoid social risks. Thinking you can avoid them, if only you pick the right plausibly-deniable phrases, is a classic blunder. Our cultural immune system will recognize it as “smug,” “masturbatory,” or even “smarmy.”

Any message which achieves your goal will be obvious to people other than the intended targets. I recommend dropping the whole plan and loving thy neighbor.

"you are worth less than a cockroach" would be safer, but less effective in my view. For one thing, it is more formulaic, and for that reason less "powerful" in the same way that dead metaphors are less powerful than live metaphors: readers of such sentences immediately take cognitive shortcuts to get at the underlying sense, so they no longer evoke vivid mental imagery in the mind.

Secondly, the version with the extra cruft explicitly brings in the concept of death, and therefore can come across as more threatening, whereas "You’re worth less than a cockroach" does not.

You are right that social risks are unavoidable, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it as a desideratum. The point is not to "dog whistle" (to have one message for the intended recipient, and a different one for everyone else). The point is rather to have the hateful and/or violent intent behind the message be transparent to everyone involved, yet the message be couched in language that allows for the highest degree of gloat-worthy plausible deniability, leaving B with as little recourse as possible. Given that these two properties pull in different directions, I'm interested to know whether there's any way to strike the best balance as it were.

"Less effective" at what? would seem to be the key question here.

Who is this person to you that you not only care enough to hate them, but care enough about what they think of you that you need them them to know that you hate them?

If @netstack's advice to "love thy nieghbor" curdles in your throat, instead ask yourself what would Don Draper say?

There is no particular person I have in mind (although I don't mind if people assume otherwise). The question is mostly technical, an intellectual exercise. If you want to know the real motivation behind me asking the question, it's largely this: that I believe that free speech laws should not outlaw "true threats" (i.e. people should be legally permitted to threaten each other with death, as long as they don't practice what they preach, so to speak) because if I'm right, it's trivially easy for a would-be issuer of a "true threat" to reword his message so that, while the overall psychological impact on the recipient would be nearly the same, the language used has near perfect plausible deniability.

hateful and/or violent intent

It strikes me that these are two entirely different things here. I have read, in newspapers and magazines, respectable journalists express complete and utter disdain for certain public figures they disliked, including turns of phrase just as bad as your cockroach example, without fear that said public figures would have them arrested. And it wasn't just Trump, this was in the pre-2016 era.

But violent intent, the idea that you yourself wish to commit actual interpersonal harm to B, that's another matter. Are you, in fact, hoping to make this person believe that you're going to come over and beat the shit out of them, but in a way that's plausibly deniable enough that they won't be able to take any legal action against you?

While variety is the spice of life, I find the phrasing too cumbersome.

“Gloat-worthy plausible deniability” is a bad heuristic. It sounds like a good idea, but I guarantee you, it does the opposite of what you want, making it easier to dismiss out of hand. Don’t write for yourself; write for your audience.

Or don’t write at all. I don’t know why writing better hate mail is so appealing to you, but I am willing to bet it’s not worth the trouble.

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