Deplatforming Hate Speech

I had planned a quiet long weekend at the trailer with family, preferably without looking at my phone. Campfires, barbecue, mosquito bites, no wifi… the basic Civic Holiday weekend in Canada. Instead, and like the majority of people in North America, I was mesmerized by the appalling spectacle of two mass shootings in the US in under 24 hours. The first, of course, being the white supremacy-motivated domestic terror attack at an El Paso Walmart, the second a more ambiguously-motivated attack outside a Dayton Ohio bar, whose shooter had an online presence dominated by left-oriented posts but whose terrorist act seems to have misogynist and/or “incel” roots. Together, both shootings killed more than thirty people.

It’s revelatory, however, to note how the right and the left reacted to each shooter. The El Paso shooter’s racist manifesto was immediately declared a false-flag operation by conspiracy theorists who then blamed the left. When it was reported that the Dayton shooter was a leftist, the left withheld judgment until it was proven, then turned that knowledge into self-examination.

Still, even for the United States, two mass shootings in twenty-four hours is shocking. What really caught my eye was that the El Paso shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, posted his rambling racist and anti-immigrant manifesto on 8chan, an internet messageboard known for being an alt-right and neo-fascist echo-chamber where the tactics of mass shootings are discussed, refined, and encouraged. Yesterday, in response to public outcry, cloud network provider Cloudflare removed 8chan’s site (why said outcry didn’t happen with two other recent mass shootings linked to 8chan is worth asking about, though.) 8chan was immediately moved to a competitor’s service called BitMitigate, which was in turn shut down by BitMitigate’s platform provider Voxility. As BitMitigate also provided services to the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, that site has also been taken down, seemingly as a happy side-effect.

The debate over this in online spaces has been… spirited. A lot of the so-called “free speech” crowd — which is often just a cover for the “hate speech” crowd, in my experience — have been condemning the deplatforming of 8chan, saying they’ll “just go somewhere else” and that Cloudflare’s (and later Voxility’s) decision is simply censorship. Others, particularly on the left, are praising the move to “deplatform” what is essentially an online white supremacist terrorist training camp.

I’m firmly in the second group. Frankly, when it comes to suppressing the spread of white supremacist and fascist hate, deplatforming works. Online activist Gwen Snyder laid down a pretty good definition of how deplatforming a hate site works, and she did concisely enough that it fit well under the 240-character limit on Twitter.

If you take away the space for hate groups to organize, hate groups get less organized. It’s that simple. The hardcore scumbags might not de-radicalize, but their opportunities to recruit and radicalize new members is negatively impacted. And in any case, criticizing deplatforming with the argument “you aren’t going to get them all” or “it’s a waste of effort” is missing the point. If you make it easy for the bastards, then it’ll be easy. If you make it harder for them, it’ll be harder. Fewer violent fascists is always a good thing. And yes, I wish there was a magic wand we could wave that would give us 100% fewer Nazis with zero effort on our part. There isn’t. That’s not a good enough reason to allow ourselves to be locked in inaction; the perfect should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good.

White supremacist terrorists — often erroneously referred to as “lone wolf” attackers — are an organized movement which recruits among disenfranchised white males online and teaches them how to kill mass numbers of people. That’s a proven fact. Making it moderately more difficult for them to recruit membership is a worthwhile thing to do. And as previous efforts at deplatforming right-wing pundits and organizations have shown, deplatforming works, if only to remove the profit margin from promoting hate.

There is an argument against deplatforming that I can respect and debate: Despite the bad-faith use of the argument by hate groups, I fully acknowledge is a legitimate position to be held that even the worst racists and homophobes have the right to freedom of expression. (Certainly, as a left-leaning anti-fascist blogger, I myself have every reason to support the right to free expression.) Canada, however, sets limits on the freedom of expression, under the “Reasonable Limits” clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, the clause forbids hate speech, which is defined as the advocacy and incitement of genocide or violence against an identifiable group; and obscenity, which is defined as expression which is unreasonable, dangerous or intensely inappropriate to society at large.) The Canadian limitations on free expression are sometimes more honoured in the breach than the observance, of course, but they do give a useful framework for what constitutes acceptable free speech, and what doesn’t.

I got into discussion on this topic just just this morning with the Twitter account for Yellow Vests Canada Exposed. YVCE is a Twitter-based group allied to Anti-Racist Canada and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and dedicated specifically to tracking bigotry and hate-organizing in the Canadian Yellow Vests movement (which, it needs to be noted again, has nothing to do with the Gilets Jaunes in France; almost as soon as it formed the Canadian YVs were co-opted by white nationalists). YVCE has done very good work monitoring the growth and spread of hate both within the Yellow Vests movements and elsewhere in Canada, including the alarming spread of neo-Nazi terrorist group “The Base” in Winnipeg… which they actually succeeded in getting deplatformed by alt-right enabling platform Gab.com just this morning.

Yesterday YVCE posted screenshots of a virulently homophobic discussion on the Yellow Vests Canada Facebook group, which I shared on Twitter with a plea — as I have pled before — that Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger stop protecting and enabling this kind of hate speech by allowing the Yellow Vests to gather at City Hall every week. YVCE’s moderator pointed out that it wasn’t their organization’s position to deny anyone the right to rally; I disagreed, on the grounds that the Yellow Vesters — especially those attending the weekly rallies at Hamilton City Hall — had more than crossed the line from free speech to hate speech.

Denying the Yellow Vests space in from of City Hall to spread their racist and homophobic speech does not, as the YVCE moderator would later claim in the same discussion, open the possibility of a “human rights case” if their protest was made illegal. Or rather, they might be able to file a human rights complaint, but under the Canadian Charter and with the above photo as proof, I honestly have to believe that they’d have a hard time making a case that they weren’t violating the hate speech clause.

Ban them, and their core members might very well go elsewhere. But it would send an important and necessary message that the City of Hamilton doesn’t tolerate the kind of attacks on its LGBTQ+ citizens that the Yellow Vests have been encouraging. The “slippery slope” claim that this would somehow erode free speech rights just doesn’t hold weight, in my opinion. They’re attacking — physically attacking — counter-protesters, and have been doing so for months. This should have been stopped long before the attack on Hamilton Pride. Left unchecked, I genuinely fear that these racist and homophobic fascists will echo-chamber themselves into attacking LGBTQ+ people with something a lot more dangerous than a cheap airsoft helmet.

Like the white supremacist threat incubated by 8chan and similar sites, the Hamilton Yellow Vests group and their allies are emboldened by official inaction on their hate speech. The Hamilton situation is a small-scale representation of the larger problem… and one which thankfully hasn’t escalated into the use of firearms. But the threat is definitely there, if you spend any time looking at these groups’ chat forums.

Community organizing against the fascists has been growing in strength since the Pride attack, which is good, but without official support against the hate groups — or worse, with tacit approval of them by the city and police — our community faces an uphill battle to try and force these fascist swine out of our spaces. We need to refuse people who are advocating hate and harm to vulnerable minorities a platform in our public discourse. The easiest way to do that is for the city to develop a policy on refusing space to hate groups and tell them — in as many words, by my preference — to fuck right off.

But that’s not the only way this could go down. If the police won’t protect us and the city won’t take action, then the only logical next step, in the face of escalating violence by the Yellow Vests and their supporters, is for the anti-fascists to respond in kind. If they use physical violence to attack us, we have to use force in self-defence. And that, ladies and gents, is where the “slippery slope” argument actually applies. Nobody — especially not the anti-fascists who will doubtlessly be subjected to a disproportionate police crackdown — wants to see a riot on the front steps of City Hall… but inaction by the City and the Police on fascist hate groups is exactly where that path leads.

It’s best for everyone if that road isn’t the one we follow.

This is the same thing that has to be done on a national level, and it has to be done in online spaces. You can claim it’s an affront to free speech all you want, but if dangerous white supremacists are organizing on 8chan, shut them down. If they’re organizing on Gab, shut them down. Wherever they are, shut them down, because they’re plotting to hurting and kill people. Chances are there will always be the threat of white supremacist terrorists, but denying them the platform to spread their hate and the forums to refine it, and they become fewer and less effective.

And “fewer and less effective” means saving lives.