[mechamicro]

Maybe there will be less monitoring. But with a lack of easily available places to congregate, the assholes will find it much more difficult to recruit, organize, and build their organization. This stagnates or reduces their membership numbers.

Also, it sends a great signal to anyone who might think of joining: that this ideology is so terrible that it's being chased off of the internet. That even the hands-off companies like Reddit and Cloudflare are rejecting it.

Sure, there will be a few who are attracted to it because it is so reviled, but many more will be repulsed. There's a reason why the hate groups did everything they could to be more appealing to the mainstream. Being forced back into the underground essentially means defeat.

As far as monitoring goes, I don't think it will make much of an impact. These are not difficult groups to infiltrate. Generally speaking, they're not the best and the brightest. Their opsec is poor. Activist groups have infiltrated many of them and have posted the discord transcripts. I'm sure the FBI, and other organizations, have gone even further than that.

[malvosenior]

The idea isn't to curtail people's freedom to assembly. It's to stop mass shootings. As much as you dislike it, people are free to organize and discuss whatever they want. They just aren't allowed to commit violence.

[mechamicro]

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. I was describing how de-platforming by private companies would weaken them while not making them substantially harder to monitor.

Of course, they still have their constitutional rights of speech and assembly. But without the signal boost provided by private companies, they'll be in a far weaker position.

[saltminer]

>Sure, there will be a few who are attracted to it because it is so reviled, but many more will be repulsed. There's a reason why the hate groups did everything they could to be more appealing to the mainstream. Being forced back into the underground essentially means defeat.

This is correct, it's the very essence of the southern strategy. As Lee Atwater once said (censorship mine, dunno HN's policy about this type of language) [0]:

>You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-----, n-----, n-----." By 1968 you can't say "n-----" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N-----, n-----."

If you join a forum and start saying "N-----, n-----, n-----", you'll probably get banned right away. But if you're talking about crime statistics and totally true stories that totally happened to you which just so happen to feature minorities as the antagonists, your dogwhistling might be allowed, and that can serve as a valuable recruiting tactic as people who don't realize it's a dogwhistle read "sources" you provide and fall down a racist rabbit hole. (Even if someone doesn't buy into these ideas right away, planting that seed can bear fruit someday - maybe they've been unsuccessful getting a job for awhile and are really frustrated, then they remember the links they were sent long ago, and suddenly it doesn't seem so unreasonable...)

[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#It.27s_about...