Wouldn't this imply that excluding places like T_D and more recently, 8chan, further continue to fuel further extremism in groups that already feel marginalized?
Not really. There's reasonable empirical evidence[1] to the contrary: removing large sources/sinks for extremism makes it harder for extremists to unify their message for effective dissemination.
AFAICT, there’s no evidence that online moderation hides extremism rather than eliminating it.
I’m not old enough to speak seriously about the way the Internet used to be, but I am old enough to remember what happened when I would be banned from a service: I would move on, until I either eventually learned my lesson or I was completely banned. Both are acceptable outcomes and the (unfortunate) consolidation of online communities over the last decade has made the former an easier policy target than the latter.
However, those who are truly motivated continue to be exiled into smaller and smaller slices of society, until what you have left is environments of concentrated toxicity, but now hidden from the watchful eyes of the general public.
It does, and it is precisely why despite all the exclusion hapening around, we still get shootings and bombings.
The people that have somehow wound up in positions of power the tech world seem to believe that placing a carpet over a hole in the floor fixes the hole. And then act surprised when they fall through the hole.
It's a tough one. On one hand 8chan is a source for stupid values to sacralize, on the other it lessens social exclusion and staves off extremist behavior.
Anonymous internet message boards with a vague "large" audience are not substitutes for actual social interaction.
It's the same problem as Facebook and other social media: people present a curated persona, and ignore that they're only seeing everyone else's curated persona as well.
Ad marketing is already well into figuring out how to manufacture "authenticity".
It is a social interaction and it has effects of one albeit weak.
You can have bits of social satisfaction from hearing 'hello, how are you' from a store clerk or from watching people interact on TV. Definitely you can get it from getting responses to you anonymous or curated speach on the internet. Of course its not the same thing as honest interaction with your friend or loved one but it doesn't mean it does nothing for you.
Please notice they made people feel isolated by not passing a ball to them in a computer game.
Social circuits in the brain are so low level they can be activated by most superficial stimuli.
I dunno, at the same time people on these communities will try to one-up one another just to get attention. (this isn't limited to just 4/8chan btw, youtube "challenges" like tasering a dead rat or instagram things are other examples)
Do you understand that two things can be true at the same time even though they sound like they're opposite to one another? It's entirely reasonable to assume that places like that both prevent many people from falling further down a hole of exclusion but also push others further inside.
Their further fall into exclusion is stopped, because they are echo-chamber bubble that pushed them further into hate.
Social isolation does not make you extremist on itself - contact with extremists that recruit you make you extremist. Social isolation make you more vulnerable to extremists.
And how many mass murderers were not linked to any online forums or they were so crazy that they got ostracised even on the most extreme forums?
Three is just a number if you don't know the sample size. If it's 3 out of 3 million and the US had 600 mass murderers out per 300 million population then 8channer is twice as safe as average Joe. (Made up numbers to illustrate the math).
But that's like saying that little neighborhood "mosque" with the hate preacher should be kept open because well, it means the "Muslim" extermists have their community there...
I put mosque in quotes because I don't recognise hate preachers' claims to be a representative of the Muslim religion.. and yes, hopefully police are arresting hate preachers and shutting down their congregations. If there are legitimate preachers there, of course the mosque shouldn't be shut down.
[1]: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf