Alternative narrative: A great way to create an echo chamber of people with abhorrent views is to drive them all off of general platforms.
We've seen movements co-opted from one thing into entirely different things fairly regularly. Vulnerable people brought into far more extreme views. The pattern seems clear with things like Gamergate that turned into a reactionary identity type thing pretty quickly. "Incels" where frustrated men feed of each other's anger and it just builds and builds.
Do you really think it is possible to censor reddit/faceboot/etc so hard that few traces of these "countercultures" show up, actually making them less discoverable? That's a much taller order.
Even here voat has been mentioned several times. IMHO that's really all it takes, because the recruitment hook is when someone clicks that sibling link to /v/programming and sees a bunch of stuff they consider "refreshing", it having been pushed out of the mainstream discourse. Then reading those critiques of blue-flavored polarization dovetails right into reading support of red-flavored polarization.
And the solution to this is to expose them to "opposition" on "general platforms"?
There is a sizable quantity of legitimate people feeling marginalized by the "mainstream" discourse, whatever the hell that means. That these various masses of people are being pushed ever-closer towards unreasonable views is the entire problem.
Twitter and Facebook do not ban "legitimate people" because they express "non-mainstream" views.
People get banned when they post graphic violence, promotion of violence, threats, intimidation and child exploitation. They also get banned for targeting harassment towards a person or group [0].
If I run a café where strangers can sit down and talk to each other, I would eject any customer who did any of these things -- to protect my "legitimate" customers and to ensure the bad actors don't wreck my café.
Bad actors don't behave badly because they've been banned. They're banned because they first behaved badly and were warned multiple times.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
What I'm referring to is that the blue team has taken over the discourse of many popular forums [0]. HN has gotten better, but a few years ago it was quite hard to raise legitimate non-blue-flavored criticism without being downvoted into oblivion. Predictably, the only red-flavored comments being left were then lower effort, which would then get flagged to death.
So then people with moderate red-flavored views are left to go find different discussion forums if they want to express those views. And the places they end up have been similarly "claimed" by the red team, and are thus analogously tolerant of red team extremism.
Now rather than experiencing events like Christchurch primarily as a shared tragedy in which humans were killed (eg holy fuck what are we all doing to each other), the tragedies are mediated by political groupthink. To avoid having to distance themselves from their extremists, the home team caricaturizes the reaction of the other team. This creates cognitive dissonance which normalizes the extremist behavior rather than condemning it.
[0] At least from our perspective here. I'm certainly willing to posit someone could have a mirrored view where their popular forums are ever-more red-team flavored. This fits into my point.
Well your argument falls apart pretty early, since people subscribing to abhorrent ideas just squelch opposition themselves anyway so they don’t have to face it. They simply want the reach, they aren’t looking to have their minds changed.
/r/the_donald is one easy example. There’s no faster place to get banned on the internet than voicing opposition there.
I think that's very much the case, if you look at some of the subreddits that are sympathetic to the NZ situation, there's no opposition within those subreddits, any hint of an opposing view results in a ban in those subs.
People end up only connected to people that share their viewpoints; and specific discussions in groups or subreddits are not occurring on a ‘soap box’ environment where the broader community is exposed or engaging with it; so it flourishes, with sometimes toxic results
Advertisers are the ones you need to keep happy not users.
Not many advertisers on sites with 0 users. You need both.