[UncleMeat]

Feel free to interpret this as "people who have actual swastika flags in their rooms and think that the way to create the best society is to mass murder jewish people."

That's a real population of extremists. Having them hang out on HN does not make their numbers dwindle.

And no, I do not think that banning Nazis from forums is "the same playbook" used by the Nazi Party.

[logicalmonster]

I can't take any claims about "the Nazis" seriously in CURRENT_YEAR because the label is thrown out so casually. I've seen some of the most commonplace and benign beliefs unironically labeled as Nazi to try and get a minor bit of political advantage.

[UncleMeat]

Use a different group then if somehow "has an actual swastika flag in their room" is too non-specific for you. "ISIS Members," if you want.

[logicalmonster]

I'm having a hard time understanding what your point is.

I'm always open to at least talking to anybody, whether or not they're ISIS members, Nazis, Communists, or (may Allah forgive me for even uttering this word) Canadian.

Talking is the road to peace. When words stop, there's only one thing that can possibly come next.

[UncleMeat]

And yet, the actual data does not demonstrate that having ISIS members on Twitter reduces their numbers.

You are free to go to their spaces and talk to them if you want. But there is no moral need or practical good to permit their hatred in all spaces.

[logicalmonster]

I hate to keep repeating this in this thread because I don't want to sound like a broken record, but it feels like you're engaging in a textbook example of the McNamara fallacy. It seems like the only thing you're able to measure is "number of bad guys", so that's the only metric for success/failure you have.

What if the more important metric for a good society was something else?

What if removing "the bad guys" from society makes them feel like they're not part of society and have nothing else left to lose so it actually pushes them to violence?

I'm not saying I have all of the answers here, but I do strongly think that your general approach here is ignoring the human side and focusing on the wrong metric for progress.