"Concerned citizen asks:
So letting white nationalists and holocaust deniers and other fringe violent groups do their worst has no effect on the amount of extremism that we see? If every social media site had the permissiveness of 8chan that would make no difference?"
Sean Malone replies:
Most people ignore fringe ideologies until they see evidence that their claims have merit. A large number of people have been warning about censorship of moderate right-wing people for a long time, and most people ignore it because the news tells them that the only people getting kicked off these platforms are the most extreme people -- people like Alex Jones who they think are nutty anyway.
So they don't start out taking claims of unfair politically-motivated censorship all that seriously. They just assume that people getting silenced are bad guys.
But when you shut down a sitting president (who some 73 million people just voted for); make it harder to access competing platforms; limit or censor certain hashtags, pages, and groups like Walk Away; and selectively enforce your Terms of Service such that more and more people are caught in the net, they start questioning the narrative that the people being shut down are just the "bad" people, and start believing that the thing they thought was mostly baseless/overblown conspiracy theory is true.
And since it becomes harder and harder to have these conversations openly, these discussions move to comment threads on fringier platforms (which will always exist), and that puts more fence-sitters -- now primed to at least be open to the idea that maybe the more extreme people were right all along -- in contact with people farther on the fringes in a context where there's less diversity of thought.
Demagogues' increased cost of communication becomes a proof-point that they were right all along -- "They're trying to shut us down because they know we're on to something!"
The extremes get more extreme. People who were on the fence get pushed out to the extremes. And normal, more rational people can't see it because it's no longer happening in 'public' venues.
-- When you narrow the range of acceptable speech, pushing more moderate people into blocked/banned categories, they end up being welcomed only by more fringe groups. Those groups grow."
https://www.facebook.com/Logicologist/posts/10110596800947759?comment_id=10110597083890739&reply_comment_id=10110597177443259
So letting white nationalists and holocaust deniers and other fringe violent groups do their worst has no effect on the amount of extremism that we see? If every social media site had the permissiveness of 8chan that would make no difference?"
Sean Malone replies:
Most people ignore fringe ideologies until they see evidence that their claims have merit. A large number of people have been warning about censorship of moderate right-wing people for a long time, and most people ignore it because the news tells them that the only people getting kicked off these platforms are the most extreme people -- people like Alex Jones who they think are nutty anyway.
So they don't start out taking claims of unfair politically-motivated censorship all that seriously. They just assume that people getting silenced are bad guys.
But when you shut down a sitting president (who some 73 million people just voted for); make it harder to access competing platforms; limit or censor certain hashtags, pages, and groups like Walk Away; and selectively enforce your Terms of Service such that more and more people are caught in the net, they start questioning the narrative that the people being shut down are just the "bad" people, and start believing that the thing they thought was mostly baseless/overblown conspiracy theory is true.
And since it becomes harder and harder to have these conversations openly, these discussions move to comment threads on fringier platforms (which will always exist), and that puts more fence-sitters -- now primed to at least be open to the idea that maybe the more extreme people were right all along -- in contact with people farther on the fringes in a context where there's less diversity of thought.
Demagogues' increased cost of communication becomes a proof-point that they were right all along -- "They're trying to shut us down because they know we're on to something!"
The extremes get more extreme. People who were on the fence get pushed out to the extremes. And normal, more rational people can't see it because it's no longer happening in 'public' venues.
-- When you narrow the range of acceptable speech, pushing more moderate people into blocked/banned categories, they end up being welcomed only by more fringe groups. Those groups grow."
https://www.facebook.com/Logicologist/posts/10110596800947759?comment_id=10110597083890739&reply_comment_id=10110597177443259