Antisemitic or Racist Sources

Question

I have never written a post like this before, because I generally do not care how StackOverflow is moderated or run. I apologize if this is overly wordy.

There is an active question which asks about another of the interchangeable antivaccine theories. To support that this theory is notable, the author links to a very antisemitic article on a crank website, where the specific question is surrounded by a very lengthy piece which blames the Jews for both the pandemic, and for vaccine-caused genocides.

I would argue that these sources should not be allowed to support notable claims. If the only source for something is a bunch of jewish space laser cranks, it's not notable. Find something that isn't horrible to link to.

That however, is not the position of the moderation team, which is not great. I don't think this platform is obligated to allow these people to spread their hate, but I can write skeptical responses to horrible anti-jew tropes. There's merit to allowing these people to talk so that you can smash their terrible ideas, and it's a position I can at least live with.

I wrote an answer to this question, which also specifically addressed the antisemitism that was all over the link advertised in the question. This answer had some upvotes, and had some downvotes (a reasonable number of people thought that parts of the answer were somewhat off-topic because the question itself didn't actually blame the jews for anything).

Then one moderator vandalized my answer, and another moderator told me to delete the part of the answer that addressed the antisemitism. When I declined, it was deleted by the moderation team. This is not acceptable. Allowing people to spread their horrible racisms or antisemitisms and specifically prohibiting skeptical analysis of these positions is not acceptable.

It does not matter that the policy you are enforcing is ostensibly position-neutral (for the record, I do not believe that the moderators would have enforced the policy in the same way if the position in question was anti-white racism instead of antisemitism). You have created a set of policies that allows me to fill a question with horrible racisms, and as long as I carefully ask a question that's tangential to the racisms, I get to spread my terrible opinions while nobody is allowed to respond.

You need to either change your policies to prohibit links to this type of content or you need to allow people to tear these terrible ideas to pieces. This is not the first time someone has brought up the problem with bad sources. I would like to specifically note that the moderator who deleted the answer that prompted this post has an opinion about why these links should be allowed:

We don't want idiots to become martyrs

By refusing to directly tackle bad ideas, we allow the proponents of those ideas to paint themselves as unfairly treated, and suggest that the ideas they have are so dangerously effective, the establishment is stopping them from sharing them.

By demolishing the ideas with evidence, we remove this opportunity.

We want the claims to be challenged

When someone naive tries to investigate these claims, trying to decide whether the denialists have a point, we want there to be Google hits to demolish their arguments. We want the aggrieved parties of the defamatory falsehoods to have a platform where they can present the evidence for the truth.

Answer 1

I take three key points from this question:

1. A rehash of a previous meta-question (that you cite).
2. A complaint that your answer was unfairly treated.
3. A casual accusation of casual racism amongst the mods.

Let's go through those:

Should we allow hate sites in notability links?

As you mention, we have discussed this before: Non notable claims, made only on hate and or conspiracy sites, should be deleted

You disagree with my top answer there (while also saying you can live with it), but what you don't do is provide any substantive argument against it. You quote parts of it, without suggesting why it might be wrong. I don't want to just repeat my arguments if they weren't persuasive the first time, but I have no reason to change them.

I think it is worth emphasizing that notability is not veracity.

We don't exclude questions because they come from unreliable sources. If we did, not only would we would be begging the question, but we would be defeating the whole purpose of the site (and giving mods too much discretion).

Notability is defined here as widely believed, and as horrible as it is, antisemitic claims are widely believed.

If we can replace the notability references with less objectionable sources or mark them with a content warning, it would be an improvement. But we shouldn't confuse that with the claim not being notable.

Was your answer vandalized and unfairly removed?

You describe your answer as a skeptical analysis of the antisemitic claims in the original source.

It wasn't a skeptical analysis. It was snark built on poorly-constructed theories, basic fallacies and no evidence. That is the reason it was edited and removed.

If you graffiti a public wall with your political views, and someone comes and repaints the wall removing the graffiti, it is not them who is doing vandalism.

Firstly, we have to accept anti-semites can be right on other topics.

Philipp Lenard was a pro-Nazi, antisemitic... chucklehead. (I feel constrained on the language I can use here.) He was also right about the shape of rain drops.

That doesn't make his racism okay. But it means we cannot simply argue "Because he is wrong about Jews and he is causing more harm to science and society with those views than he is helping with his experiments, we can conclude he is wrong about the shape of rain drops."

That would be a classic ad hominem fallacy.

It is not unreasonable to ask or answer a question about Henry Ford here without reference to his chucklehead views about Judaism.

Similarly, it is not unreasonable to ask if this chucklehead is right about vaccine ingredients, even though he is offensively wrong about other topics.

So, tackling the antisemiticism isn't enough. You need to tackle the claim.

Here is an example of a question about a claim from a hate group, where I first addressed the claim, and then addressed the antisemiticism derived from the claim.

Your answer argued that vaccines could not contain Graphene Hydroxide because the original claimant had not been "executed by the Rothschild-controlled central banks" - the first mention of such a theory in the question or answer. You didn't even give evidence that the claimant was still alive. That is NOT addressing antisemitism and it is NOT addressing the question.

Your answer had some weird digression about Australian death camps - nothing to do with the question nor the antisemitism. It linked to an unrelated conspiracy theory blog which, inevitably, has antisemitic blood libel content too. [Forgive me for not linking it here.] If questions having links to sites with hate-filled content is bad, answers having such links is much worse.

The strongest part of the answer was that Belgium (why cherry-pick Belgium?) has a moderately high vaccination rate and you claim (without reference, just that you would have heard) there have been not been a high number of deaths after vaccinations there.

We don't accept unreferenced political posturing. We don't accept theoretical answers without references. You explicitly refused to fix the answer, and it was deleted.

Do we have casual antisemitism amongst the mods?

You write:

for the record, I do not believe that the moderators would have enforced the policy in the same way if the position in question was anti-white racism instead of antisemitism

This is an irresponsible and uncalled for accusation. You should take more care before throwing around such insults.

Fortunately, we can show that have a long record of dealing with antisemitic and racist claims responsibly:

Here are a smattering or related questions:

• Are American media controlled mostly by Jews?
• Are Ashkenazi Jews largely descended from Khazars?
• Are The Young Turks Funded by George Soros?
• Did 5 million non-Jews die in the Holocaust?
• Has the Holocaust been exaggerated?
• Do the Jewish control a larger proportion of U.S. wealth than their proportion in the population?

I think the results of these questions - which often required careful editing and moderation, as users with 10K rep can confirm - reflects well on Skeptics.SE as a site dealing with such claims.

While I maintain that we haven't recognised any taboos on this site, I have a couple of caveats. One is that, we used to be bothered by a very, very persistent, but not very bright, Holocaust-denying chucklehead troll asking questions in bad faith to promote stupid ideas. As a result, if a question touches on Holocaust denial, the mods tend to scrutinise it more carefully and give very little latitude. The topic isn't banned, as the questions above demonstrate, but it needs to follow the rules.

Answer 2

I partly agree with you, though as a mod I feel like I can't put my personal believes over established, community-shaped policies. We are here to enforce site rules, not act as we please (that doesn't mean that we can't help shape the rules though).

If the only source for something is a bunch of jewish space laser cranks, it's not notable.

Sadly, I think that this isn't necessarily true. If we can show that a lot of people read these crank sources, then it's notable (the space laser claim eg would be notable, even if it weren't also picked up by non-crank media). I do have my doubt about the notability of this specific source, but not enough to mod-close. As a member, you are free to vote to close though (and of course, to downvote).

Find something that isn't horrible to link to.

Whenever possible, I'd edit questions which use antisemitic or racist sources with non-bigoted alternatives (I did not see the antisemitic content here; thanks for pointing it out, I have replaced the source).

Regarding your answer: Personally, I'm fine with an aside that addresses implied claims, or other claims in the source that aren't in the question. They shouldn't be the majority of the answer though, and they should be sourced (and ideally not contain too much sarcasm). The part of your answer that addressed the claim was largely theoretical, and as such your answer was deleted along with a number of other theoretical answers.

Answer 3

This is a really difficult topic. The purpose of our site is to debunk bad information, but every time we post a question here we also publish potentially bad information. There is no way around that, and I think in most cases it is worth the additional exposure we give those claims in order to be able to debunk them.

But if we have a question that was actually not widely published before, and it gets a hot network question we fail our primary purpose. We become a publisher of bad information instead of a site focused on debunking it. It only makes sense to debunk claims that people actually believe, in our case this specifically means that the additional exposure we give the claim must not be larger than the exposure it already has. That is one of the purposes of our notability requirements, to ensure that we can't easily be misused to spread misinformation instead of fighting it.

In practice this gets really, really messy. In the end it comes down to judgement calls by us moderators because for the non-obvious cases there are no good objective measures of notability.

One problem in this particular case is that the actual claim is completely separate from the offensive and anti-semitic conspiracy theories in that article. I didn't even notice these at first because they were not part of the quote. I think this is the primary reason why the moderation action here feel so wrong to you. Removing your answer is entirely correct if we consider the narrow version of this claim that only consists of the specific quote. I think that is the more useful version of the claim we should address, but that is not a completely obvious distinction and I don't think we can entirely ignore the offensive rest of the blog post.

I think we need to be able to tolerate questions with inherently offensive claims, if the value of debunking them outweighs the harm we do by giving them a bigger audience. But this case is just so much messier because the offensive parts are not the core of the claim. I think switching out the sources is the best we can do here.

Answer 4

I wrote the original question the OP is referring to and personally I'm glad the mods did their job properly and deleted the 'non-answer' by said OP, which by then accrued the highest number of votes and over dominated the other answers.

In my opinion it felt closer to a rant and emotional rather than factual. I wrote the question with no ill-intent. I didn't peruse the site, had no awareness of any antisemitic rhetoric; it was the highest, (I think, but definitely towards the top of searching Graphene Hydroxide). If anyone has an issue about promoting antisemitic websites, I suggest to take it up with search engines and not here.

I don't believe Jews should be held to a different standard with regards to hate speech, and I take offense to suggest that moderators would behave differently with any other group. It's mind-reading and attributing motives.

Lastly, since a large part of SE is debunking conspiracy theories and a large overlap between conspiracies and Jew hatred exists, it's inevitable this will happen again, to clean an infected wound, expect a lot of blood and pus.

Shutting down conversation IMO is the wrong approach and actually adds fuel to the fire, that Jews control the media etc, or censorship proves it must be true. Sunlight is the best disinfectant!