The darkness is only ever undone by shining a light. By all means, people of reasonable sense should take a moment to look at Gab and realize what counter-factual nonsense it is, because banning it or censoring it will only make it more powerful.
All that does is create a filter bubbles. On subreddits like the_donald, cringeanarchy and others that slowly turned into hate-filled cesspools, there have been users who had a bout of self-realization and left the sub.
Over time, there's a larger exodus of regular people, leaving only the crazies talking to each other.
> Over time, there's a larger exodus of regular people, leaving only the crazies talking to each other.
That's how it's supposed to work. At the end of the day, there's a nonzero amount of people who believe this nonsense, and reaching them is a different set of problems (Education? Therapy?) but getting the vast majority to abandon it is sufficient.
That's a common claim, but I've seen precious little evidence for it. For decades US Nazis and other loons were justifiably obscure. But the rise of the Internet, which enabled all sorts of connection, also enabled our country's worst to more easily connect, network, and recruit. A good book on the topic is Neiwart's "Alt-America", written by a journalist who studied American white supremacists starting in the 1980s.
As a counterpoint, just recently we saw Tommy Robinson, far right activist and repeat felon, get crushed in the European elections. Why did fail? He himself says social media bans were the reason: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/european-elec...
Deplatforming works. If we need people to understand awful people and awful ideas, history provides us with plenty of examples. Similarly, if we want people to understand tigers, we don't just turn tigers loose in the classroom. We read books, we see videos, maybe we visit a zoo.
Nobody is talking about banning history books about Nazis. They're not even talking about about preventing Nazis from speaking. They're just choosing to exercise their freedom of association and not provide a platform for Nazis, the same way they boot harassers and spammers. And the same way that publishers have for centuries declined to publish works they don't want to stand behind.
You can handwave all you like about the (vague, unspecified) horrible cost. But unless you have clear, specific harms to weigh against the actual harm caused by Nazis, you're just blowing smoke.
> You can handwave all you like about the (vague, unspecified) horrible cost.
There is a place on Earth where opinions deemed to be bad are vigilantly monitored for and instantly deplatformed: The People's Republic of China. Is that truly the future you wish for?
Reading these posts from the modern left is ghastly to those of us who remain old school liberals. To defeat their opponents and prevent them from crushing the human rights of innocents, the modern left has become willing themselves to crush various other human rights that they deem unimportant. Thus we see Nietzsche spake truly: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."
Sure, and I agree the government shouldn't have that power. Duh.
I'm just saying that free citizens should not be obligated to serve Nazis or publish their content. And also that citizens should be able to criticize those who do. My position here is consistently pro-freedom. Specifically, I'm for free speech and free association.
> I'm just saying that free citizens should not be obligated to serve Nazis or publish their content. ... Specifically, I'm for free speech and free association.
The analogy with Nietzsche's quote gets even closer. Much the same pious rhetoric about free association was once used by your opponents to defend their denial of service to various racial and religious groups. It took years of activism to get legislation that recognized that freedom of association had to be limited to stop discrimination against protected classes. Consider that California has recently enacted legislation that recognizes political affiliation as a protected class in the workplace; that is the spirit and philosophy of liberalism.
And, for the record, no, no one should want to provide service to Nazis or other hate groups. But once denying services to groups becomes normalized as a political weapon, we are pretty much guaranteed that it will eventually be misused.
> ...that criticism is equivalent to what the PRC does, is hyperbolic pants-wetting
I note that you have deftly slipped in the word "criticism" here when the topic was deplatforming. Criticism is, of course, not equivalent to what the PRC does but deplatforming most assuredly is.
>Why did fail? He himself says social media bans were the reason.
Politician blames everything but his own politics for his failure to get elected. News at 11.
>For decades US Nazis and other loons were justifiably obscure. But the rise of the Internet, which enabled all sorts of connection, also enabled our country's worst to more easily connect, network, and recruit.
And yet the number of race riots and violent crime has fallen drastically since the 1980s, even with the rise of the Internet. LA hasn't had a repeat of 1992 yet. There is no Unabomber trying to spread their manifesto and the number of terror attacks in the Western world has subsided dramatically (there are no Troubles in Ireland, terrorists aren't taking over the Olympics, etc.), even though the knowledge to make explosives and sorts of manuals to commit those crimes are more available than ever before. OWS never got off the ground, even with Internet support; it's no surprise that more unpopular groups with far smaller membership aren't getting a huge benefit from it either.
Even if hate crimes are on the rise because the Internet exists, the correlation is small enough to be trivial because the factors contributing to the massive decline in crime utterly dominate them. Maybe we should be focused on keeping those going rather than jumping to conclusions.
Besides, if the Nazis come, they'll be voted in overwhelmingly due to an utter failure of economic conditions. Limits on what such a government can do that can't be easily sold by a society, like freedom of speech, are the best protection against such a thing should it ever actually happen.
Experts who study the topic make pretty clear that this is a problem. That you, an anonymous person on the internet, believe otherwise, is not much in the way of evidence.
It's also ridiculous that you conflate the 1992 riots (which were a spontaneous reaction to police violence) with the sort of things that Nazis would like to get up to. It's even more ridiculous that you ignore things like the Charlottesville car attack, the Isla Vista killings, or the Christchurch mosque shootings, all of which were by ideologues radicalized on the Internet. Ridiculous and telling.
You are missing a lot of understanding not just on the initial cause of the 92 riots but the effects including racial violence - which is exactly the sort of thing Nazis would get up to.
Can you quote some experts? And, preferably not some far right quack blaming twitter for him losing.
Likewise, you seem to be caught up in some epiphenomenon issues - you blame the internet for these attacks yet similar attacks and much worse ones preceeded the internet. Therefore deplatforming is a red herring, you're literally just using tragic attacks to push deplatforming messages you disagree with - and I don't like those messages either, but censorship isn't the answer.
Your handwaving on the Rodney King riots is unpersuasive. I already pointed people at an expert: David Neiwert, and in particular his book Alt-America. And your logic is very poor. By it, we could also prove that vaccines don't do anything, because clearly we had diseases both before and after their invention.
So as mentioned in my bio, I think you've used up your ration of my time. You'll have to carry on in your support of violent white supremacists without me.
This is a good way to put it. Gab and its sort come from a perspective that putting hungry tigers with kittens lets the kittens teach the tigers not to eat them.
Freedom of association means that businesses can generally serve who they want. Declining to serve spammers is not "interfering in foreign commerce". Declining to serve abusive jerks is not "interfering in foreign elections".
Freedom of speech is not a right to a platform. Freedom of speech also isn't the freedom of consequences from one's speech. I'm free to say what I want. Other people are free to, based on that speech, decide I'm an asshole and that they don't want anything to do with me.
You just shifted the goalposts on a massive scale. You weren't talking about "abusive jerks" were you? You were talking about actual British citizens who ran for election, which makes them politicians. Whether you like them or not is irrelevant - if "abusive jerk" was the bar, no politician at all could use social media, as there'd be a significant number of people who felt that way for all of them.
In practice I can see that you're fully in support of censoring politicians you disagree with, whilst allowing those you support free reign. That's an exceptionally dangerous path. You certainly cannot hold that view and also make arguments about "foreign interference in elections" being bad - beyond the total absence of proof around what you're thinking of (Russia), Facebook blocking local politicians is by any definition a foreign company interfering in local elections. The fact that you support the move because it's against people you dislike is irrelevant for avoiding a charge of hypocrisy.
