I'd not say the recent far-right terrorism is just from some individual psychopaths with no value for human life. There's a ton of far-right/alt-right ideas out there, on platforms like 8chan, which actively demonizes certain groups of people. It's not like these shootings are just crazy people who just want to kill people at random; they want to kill the people they see as the "enemy".
Then what’s different about extremist communities?
Deplatforming 8chan isn't about limiting the ability of these people to kill large numbers (that would require effective gun control) - it's about removing a source of provocation, radicalisation, cheering, etc. for them both before and after.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/how-can...
Further, your definition of terrorism eludes me. What gives you the impression that 8chan conducts, facilitates and organizes terror?
That's why the best course of action is to not censor at all and allow the system to work itself out.
I should clarify, I'm not advocating complete freedom in this regard. We don't want a society where it's hard to be a gay person because lots of companies deny service to homosexuals. However, we also can't claim that every company should always have to serve everyone. There is certainly some nuance and ambiguity here, but not hosting services for groups which support far-right terror seems to be fairly reasonable.
In the 1700's, when we were having the debate over speech protected from government interference, someone could have easily said "yes well if you don't like the government's policies you should go to another country!"
The existence of alternatives is irrelevant to the fact that freedom of speech is sacred and forums for speech - public or private - must never infringe upon its freedom.
In this case, the idea is to lose a bit of free speech, and gain less hatred and less murder. That is not an arbitrary judgement; admittedly this is also not a clear-cut judgement.
The system never works itself out, successful societies are the ones which have established governing rules. Game theory has given us pretty good indication that systems rather self-destruct without governance than self-stabilize.
I disagree with this sentiment, and upon reflection of why, it seems we've come to a real-life example of the trolly problem. Choosing to be passive and "let the system sort itself out" will almost certainly result in more deaths (edit: specifically in terms of mass shootings), but choosing to be active means the powers that be are forced to make subjective choices. I personally believe that it's worth taking on the responsibility of subjective choice.
Edit: However, I also realize that censorship oftentimes just ostracizes already-radical groups. This has the advantage of making it harder for them to find an audience, but also allows them to radicalize further while under less scrutiny, which also seems like a complicated balance to me.
what if rather than being a viper pit of nefarious hatemongers seeking to brainwash the youth into committing acts of violence, imageboards tend to be popular among a subset of the population more prone to depression & more severe mental illnesses which also happens to the encompass the the kinds of loser psychopath edgelords who commit these sorts of crimes. the whole response around these events simply shows we've learned nothing from columbine and are still in essence trying to eradicate the trenchcoat mafia.
