[tptacek]

A microscopic percentage of social media users have even heard of blocklists, let alone use them, but it's the people who forcefully opt themselves out of pointless Internet arguments that are the problem? That's a ridiculous and telling argument.

[ilikehurdles]

A majority percentage of social media users have their content catered such that it agrees with their sensibilities. Whether they've heard of blocklists or not, things they don't like are effectively blocked from appearing before their eyes.

[tptacek]

Once again: it is hard to understand the reasonable argument that says that a big problem with social media is that people disengage from arguments with random people too much.

[adamrezich]

Disengaging from random arguments isn't the problem; the problem is living in a world where nearly every opinion you see more or less aligns with your own views, to the point where we've been conditioned to see dissenting opinions as being hostile to us to the point where we instinctively reach for the unfollow/block/mute button when we see them.

[tptacek]

Why does that mean people shouldn’t be able to pick and choose who the talk to on social media?

[adamrezich]

It's not about picking and choosing who you engage with, it's about filtering broad-stroke opinions you disagree with out of your life entirely, such that when one sees any trace of an opinion that runs contrary to their own internal narrative, they reach for the block/unfollow button, instead of engaging to find mutual truth, or even just ignoring it and scrolling past it. Just a few years ago, when someone saw an opinion online that they disagreed with, it didn't fill them with the urge to remove that opinion and any chance of seeing similar opinions from their worldview, but that's how we've been conditioned due to social media being used increasingly politically.

[tptacek]

Again it is unclear to me how you have arrived at a duty people apparently have to carefully consider noxious arguments from strangers.

[IGI-111]

You're arguing for the personal right to act a certain way as I understand it.

I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.

These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.

It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".

[tptacek]

What makes you think it's productive to enable coerced 1:1 political conversations between strangers? That's what it means to lobby against blocklists.

On the contrary, I think there should be far more blocklists.

Opponents of blocklists get themselves wound up over the potential productive conversations that might occur were it not for the overzealous filtering of the lists. But I don't see any positive value in that potential. The overwhelming majority of potential 1:1 political debates never occur, and nobody cares. Why should I then be concerned over potential Twitter debates, which are adversely selected for toxicity?

People who are passionate about the evils of blocklists also have a hard time not coming across like the sea lion from the cartoon.