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by IfOnlyYouKnew
1992 days ago
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FWIW, I've almost never seen this argument made by people who aren't secretly or openly supporting those who are banned (you being the exception here). I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since? And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control. |
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But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).
It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.
e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.
I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?
Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.