This is a very timely service, given the current climate in which de-platforming is poised to accelerate.
It basically is a fundamental part of our psyche. It's never going away.
What a piss-poor cop out argument this is. There are lots of impulsive, animalistic features still baked into our slightly more evolved reptilian brains, and it seems we haven't had much problem ironing out some of the worst of those impulses for net positive outcomes.
Clubbing people from different tribes over the head with tree branches, for example-being one of them.
Why, pray tell-is/should this be any different?
I think the cases for which that's true don't tend to correlate with the sort of content we're discussing. I don't think "outrage culture" is the reason people object to Alex Jones, as an example.
He wouldn't necessarily, because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular. And his message has real-world consequences which sometimes can't be simply ignored. Harassing the victims of mass shootings is going to become a thing now because he's convinced people that all of them are staged and the victims are crisis actors.
>But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on.
We may simply be disagreeing on what constitutes outrage culture. To me, it's outrage for its own sake, outrage as identity politics and virtue signaling ... and there is certainly a lot of that on social media.
But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons to be outraged at Alex Jones and people like him, which to me makes it no longer outrage culture, but just outrage.
He claims he's received over 5 million new subscriptions to his paid service since he was kicked off multiple social media sites. And even if he's lying about that, the Streisand effect is real.
"But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons..."
This is a guy who says lizard people from Mars are deeply involved in the ongoings of our politics. Being outraged that a (pretend) crazy person says something crazy seems like an incredibly useless and unproductive emotional response.
If the only people he demonized were "lizard people from Mars," then yes, it would be silly to take him seriously, because there aren't any actual lizard people from Mars who could be victimized by that, but that isn't the case.
I didn't want to make assumptions though so I asked.
But my thesis is literally that once people take it seriously, it no longer becomes outrage culture, which is a politically neutral statement. Notwithstanding the implicit politically biased undertones which make "unspoken implications" difficult to avoid.