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by AlexandrB 1921 days ago
The "virulent" media these days is 280 chr tweets, videos of guys talking into their phone in their car, and Facebook groups. The idea that anyone today is radicalized by long-form prose is pretty out there. Instead, banning problematic books creates the perfect rallying cry for our generation's ideologues to recruit more followers on social media platforms and Youtube. Of the people talking about the recently discontinued Seuss books, how many have ever even read them? I know I haven't.
1 comments

This is true, and another reason why I have problems with my "generous" take. However, I'd also suggest that the notion of a friction factor applies to new media as well: if Twitter makes it difficult to be casually racist on their platform, but there still exist sites which allow you to be casually racist, it spares the average individual from having their mental namespace polluted with those "virulent ideas" without eliminating free speech entirely. Whether this is a positive thing, or even an acceptable course of action is something I'm very dubious of, however.

This is all just my initial take on the topic though: I always have difficulty engaging with stuff like this and forming opinions constructively since it's just an exhausting concept to try to be productive with people on.

edit: I realize now that I misunderstood your point: I thought you were saying "new media can have a radicalizing effect" to which this comment was responding to by saying "light regulation works for new media as well". I now understand you said that "old media doesn't radicalize a significant number of people" which has the obvious endpoint "light regulation of old media isn't necessary". On balance, I definitely agree with that.