[AshWolfy]

People dont like to think they are being tricked, and will actively reject truth if it contradicts what they already believe.

Doing something like this can be great, but it takes time and effort, meanwhile acts of terrorism are being committed now.

Most qanoners dont really believe it, and if separated from their echo chambers, will deradicalize themselves

[danans]

> Most qanoners dont really believe it

Not only that, for many of them it's just fun - in exactly the same way that some people find supermarket tabloids entertaining. The audience for these conspiracies is quite similar (probably overlaps) with the audience of the National Enquirer.

[AshWolfy]

You should reach eichmann in jerusulem, most people who follow movements like these are just conformists like eichmann, they usually cant be convinced otherwise because they dont really believe anything at all

I know a qanoner in real life, and when i talked to him about it he denied easily provable facts, shifted goalposts, assumed i made arguments i didnt make, and now has taken to literally yelling over me so he cant hear the words im saying

[AnthonyMouse]

> People dont like to think they are being tricked, and will actively reject truth if it contradicts what they already believe.

I never liked that study because people always read it like that.

When people receive new information, they try to make it consistent with what they already believe by making the smallest possible change to the existing belief system to make them consistent.

That could be as simple as just not believing you.

This can strengthen their belief in the existing thing because they just evaluated it against some potentially conflicting new information without rejecting it.

Just not believing you doesn't work for an article like that because it's reasoning rather than facts. They have to find a hole in the logic if they want to keep their existing beliefs. So they'll come up with something like, maybe that's how it works for other conspiracy theories, but this one is real so it doesn't apply.

But now the logic is in their head, so the next time the conspiracy theory has to be reframed to match a changing reality, they notice that what's happening is consistent with the logic. It makes them doubt.

And the more information and reasoning they're exposed to which is inconsistent with the conspiracy theory, the more they doubt. It just like how the Big Lie works, but in reverse. You expose them to truth and logic over and over until they can no longer make the conspiracy theory consistent with it.

> Doing something like this can be great, but it takes time and effort, meanwhile acts of terrorism are being committed now.

"Acts of terrorism" aren't speech so as soon as they go there they go to jail. I mean they were planning it openly on Facebook, it was kind of a discredit to law enforcement that they weren't arrested for the conspiracy to begin with.

> Most qanoners dont really believe it, and if separated from their echo chambers, will deradicalize themselves

But that's why we need free speech, right? To avoid echo chambers.

Even if private censorship is allowed, that doesn't make it a good idea if it causes people to leave for some Voat-like cesspool where they won't encounter ordinary people anymore.

[danans]

> Even if private censorship is allowed, that doesn't make it a good idea if it causes people to leave for some Voat-like cesspool where they won't encounter ordinary people anymore.

Absent access to "ordinary people" to recruit to violent causes, the inhabitants of such a "cesspool" will likely bore of their own conversation.

If, as you state, any of them are engaged in illegal provocation to violence, they will be easier to find there, since they lack the shield generated by the noise of "ordinary" conversation.

Besides, nobody is going to "helped" away from violent provocation by casually interacting with them social media. The only thing that can help such people is real in-person and trusted interaction, like at church, with a community help group, or with a therapist.

At best social media can be used to identify candidates to be offered an off-ramp from the road they are on, but that needs to be done by people who do de-radicalization as a full time job or mission, not casual social media acquaintances. Very few people are dedicated to that kind of work today.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Absent access to "ordinary people" to recruit to violent causes, the inhabitants of such a "cesspool" will likely bore of their own conversation.

So then there is nothing at all to fear from Parler and all of the efforts to keep it offline are misguided?

> If, as you state, any of them are engaged in illegal provocation to violence, they will be easier to find there, since they lack the shield generated by the noise of "ordinary" conversation.

Even in a garbage fire like Voat, the vast majority of posts aren't illegal. You need the ordinary people there because they're the ones willing to report violence to the police when they see it.

> Besides, nobody is going to "helped" away from violent provocation by interacting with them social media. The only thing that can help such people are real in-person and community interaction, like at church

Something something COVID.

[wolco5]

"So then there is nothing at all to fear from Parler and all of the efforts to keep it offline are misguided?"

If you fear Parler being online, you are being tricked by the media.

[AshWolfy]

Thats assuming they engage with the logic at all, which is an assumption you cant make

> "Acts of terrorism" aren't speech so as soon as they go there they go to jail.

preventing terrorism is generally considered better than just arresting people after it happened

> But that's why we need free speech, right? To avoid echo chambers.

Unless you are suggesting we ban all moderation, no echo chambers form due to selecting information sources you only agree with and information sources pandering

> Even if private censorship is allowed, that doesn't make it a good idea if it causes people to leave for some Voat-like cesspool where they won't encounter ordinary people anymore.

censorship at least gets rid of the non true believers, the reason stuff like qanon spread so quickly is because they used sites like facebook and twitter and didnt stay in cesspools like 8chan, we cant get everyone but most is better than none

[AnthonyMouse]

> Thats assuming they engage with the logic at all, which is an assumption you cant make

Even people with psychological conditions have the capacity to modify their behavior.

> preventing terrorism is generally considered better than just arresting people after it happened

That premise came out of 9/11 when the terrorists didn't care if they died. In ordinary cases such as these you don't need a precrime unit because catching them after the fact provides a deterrent that prevents them from doing it to begin with.

But also, the police already do that. They send under cover officers into extremist groups and get warrants to conduct surveillance on individuals suspected of plotting violence. Then they get arrested for the plotting violence, not for speech.

> Unless you are suggesting we ban all moderation, no echo chambers form due to selecting information sources you only agree with and information sources pandering

The largest sites could exclude only that which is illegal.

> censorship at least gets rid of the non true believers

Until you actually implement it and end up censoring a bunch of stuff which is true, preventing some other lie from being corrected. And then people find out about that happening and lose faith in the censors, start looking for "alternative" media that doesn't do that, and get sucked back into conspiracy theory land.

> the reason stuff like qanon spread so quickly is because they used sites like facebook

The reason it spread so quickly is that Facebook promoted it, because their algorithms reward controversy.

And that's the real problem. If you carry on promoting "engagement" there will just be some new conspiracy theory, which you don't even notice until there are already a million people sucked into it and somebody gets killed. Stop doing that and there is nothing to censor.