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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

You realize Voat exists right? And Gab? I wrote this about how Voat grew:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/

Deplatforming was a big part of that. Deplatforming didn't stop Milo. His base dropped him because he started defending hebeaphiles & pedophile / men being attracted to teens/pre-teens/boys (there's actually something sadder here; with Milo not realizing he was himself abused ... there's an entire tragic story lost there people don't seem to understand or pick up on because they're too busy hating him).

They might leave the platforms you like, but they move over to Voat, Gab or startup their own Pleroma/Mastodon instances (that get banned from everywhere). Deplatforming doesn't really work in the way you thin it does. It literally gives people more drive to stand up for and behind what Capital-T "truth" they think got themselves banned.

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Deplatforming doesn't work by silencing people, and the environment that you'd have to create to make it otherwise is not an enticing one. So yes, you can often cause the creation of spaces like Voat as a result of deplatforming.

Sure, something like Voat pops up. But Reddit improves. And Reddit is where all the people are.

There will always be dive bars, there will always be rough online neighbourhoods. But start by cleaning up the civic square.

> And Reddit is where all the people are.

All the people in your echo chamber, that is.

If what you mean to say is that "the subset of spaces that does not include Voat and Gab is an echo chamber", you are probably saying something about your own views that you might not mean to say.

How so?

To be clear, I definitely don't agree with most of what is said on Voat, and I'm not really familiar with Gab.

You might want to familiarize yourself more with services before making sweeping arguments about what excluding them means for the discourse.

Having complete information before forming any opinion is an impossibly high standard. My opinion is based on what I know, and I've been pretty open about what I don't know. If you feel there's some relevant information I'm missing, I'd be really happy to hear it, but pointing out that I don't know everything is fairly uninformative.

Let's keep the discussion on the topic, not on me.

The standard you're being held to isn't "complete information".

What standard am I being held to? Where am I failing to meet that standard? Do you actually have any disagreement with anything I've said, or are you just going to make snide remarks from the sideline?

You aren't making any concrete statements on where you think I'm wrong, and you are evading any questions I've asked to try to get clarity, so to be honest, I have no idea what you actually think I'm wrong about, or even whether you think I'm wrong.

If it were someone else, I'd just dismiss you as a troll, but I've read and respected your opinions in the past, which makes your current method of arguing a bit disappointing for me. You're well-positioned to change my mind if you ever decide to share what you actually think.

It's blatantly true that Reddit still holds echo chambers though, and the majority are far-left leaning. r/politics is as much of an echo chamber as r/The_Donald (but one is a default sub, with a deceptive name).

That's why I was particular about what I was taking them to be saying. I'm not looking to litigate whether there are echo chambers on Reddit. There clearly are. The question, now tacitly answered, is whether the person I replied to believes any space that excludes Voat and Gab is definitionally an echo chamber.

> The question, now tacitly answered, is whether the person I replied to believes any space that excludes Voat and Gab is definitionally an echo chamber.

If that's what you think I was saying, let me clarify: no, that's not what I was saying.

Voat is tiny. Sure there is always going to be a population of die hard edgelords who are determined enough to move to a new site, but in general the vast majority of people are lazy. And most likely it takes the bot / disinformation account owners a while to move all their activity over to a new community

More and more, as time goes on, people are leaving the MSM including reddit for these off-shoots and it risks creating separate bubbles for every group-think out there. This is what de-platforming and cancel culture does.

It's also not black and white. Sure 99% of us can agree that banning or de-platforming such horrendous stuff like NAMBLA is good. But MSM starts to push out and group non-extremists into the same bucket and ban them all, and you get where we are today, with a good chunk of society that doesn't listen to or trust the MSM.

This is akin to an argument that you shouldn't fire your nazi-sympathizing coworker when they discuss their support for an ethnonationalist state because they may join neo-nazi groups and "radicalize" as a result.

Yes, they may. But while they do the workplace where most people interact is a livable place for the rest of us. We shouldn't make it easier to be heard if you have despicable views just because of the implied threat it might get worse.

Yes, and for truly horrendous viewpoints it's ok to ban them outright. But society isn't black and white, and when you start lumping non-extremists into the same bucket and banning them all you end up where we are today: distrust of MSM but a big chunk of society.

You keep talking about "non-extremists" but you are not telling us what you mean by that.

I don't want to get political, but do you think Joe Rogan is an extremist? Jeanine Cummins? What about Ben Shapiro?

These are people that the MSM is trying to cancel quite literally right now.

Haha the idea that incumbent news firms can do anything to Rogan is kind of hilarious. What are they going to do, shut down the internet and UFC? Close all the comedy clubs? He is completely insulated from anything they can do.

"cancel" doesn't really mean anything here.

I don't think Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro should get fired from the average workplace (I'm not familiar with Jeanine Cummins) unless they insist on trying to impose their views. I don't think they should be banned from presumably neutral platforms (reddit, Facebook, Twitter).

On the other hand, I don't think they should be given a column in other media publications and they're more than fair game for ridicule and criticism. I don't think they have a moral right to publish in any subgroup within ostensibly neutral platforms (Facebook group, subreddit).

Nobody is trying to cancel Joe Rogan. I don't know who Jeanine Cummins is. Ben Shapiro is definitely an extremist.

>>>Nobody is trying to cancel Joe Rogan.

Oh I bet the Woke Twitterati (tm) would if they could, but Joe Rogan is in the same stratosphere as Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle where they are effectively impervious to cancellation barring some Harvey Weinstein/Bill Cosby-level misconduct.

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/joe-rogan-cancel-culture-sme...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvAc7002eRM

A workplace is pretty different from a public communications platform.

Surely you can tell the difference between talking about odious opinions on the internet, and making decisions as a representative of a company based on those odious opinions.

That's OK. People do move to platforms like Gab, but those platforms tend to be echo chambers in their own which has a limiting effect on their popularity in addition to the limiting factor of their initial toxicity.

They're not really good for recruitment (because they're echo chambers that only appeal to people already invested in a point of view), nor do they provide much amusement from baiting other people with very different opinions; these two factors are in stark contrast to mainstream platforms, which provide an abundant supply of both.

Naturally, you get cross-platform raiding where people organize on one platform to attack another and then enjoy the spoils if their attack results in upset, outrage, bans of the target etc. But off-platform raids are relatively easy for platform operators and target populations to monitor, detect, and repel. Likewise, the extremist or highly toxic platforms that people do congregate on function well for a policy of managed containment.

I'd argue that in this case, it deplatforming absolutely worked in the way intended. There are 2 factors at play here. People who are willing to argue in good faith, and people who are simply trying to put forth an agenda regardless of what anyone says.

Those who likely moved to Gab and Voat and 4/8chan are likely persons that fit the latter description. There is no need to even have discussions with people like these on the internet. The best is for them to be deplatformed and continue their self flagellation. They are simply too far gone. If anything, these sites will probably radicalize, but it will also be easier for authorities to keep tabs on particularly dangerous accounts.

The concept of deplatforming is to protect the integrity of good faith discussion. The key idea there is "good faith". Persons like the aforementioned Milo clearly do not engage in any concept of good faith discussion. IMO there is no need for any discussion base like reddit or facebook to protect these types.

> People who are willing to argue in good faith, and people who are simply trying to put forth an agenda regardless of what anyone says.

I think that it would be wise to doubt one's own ability to differentiate between these two groups.

I also think that the purpose of public debate is not to persuade the person you are debating with: that's almost never possible. It's to persuade the audience. Bad faith arguments, if they really are bad faith arguments, are usually pretty easy to shoot down, so I don't think that we have anything to fear from bad-faith arguers.

In fact, deplatforming benefits bad-faith arguers because their bad-faith arguments look more reasonable when nobody confronts them.

At another level, deplatforming is a bad faith argument, by your own definition. Aren't you trying to put forth your agenda, regardless of what anyone says, by deplatforming people? Your agenda may be good, but that doesn't justify bad faith actions to support it.

Deplatforming can't work- otherwise the world would now be as white-bread homophobic and misogynistic as it was in the 50's when blacks, gays, and women were deplatformed.

This isn't same thing and you know it. Deplatforming someone for being racist, homophobic and sexist is and should continue to be encouraged.

In your example, what they were doing was fundamentally wrong and if you asked any good person today they would tell you as much.

Please tell me you recognize the irony of your comment.

Your last sentence is essentially indistinguishable from the position held 50 years ago by people who also felt they were "morally right" in deplatforming.

That kind of implies those social groups all had full participation on the social platform and were then kicked off it, no? I don't think you've thought this analogy through fully.

Deplatforming totally works, it quarantines the toxic people/ideas and doesn't allow them to spread further. Its fine if they move to voat or whatever, voat has orders of magnitude less people who use it casually, so there is a much lower opportunity for their message to spread.

Only the most dedicated move to those platforms. Those willing to leave the mainstream so they can continue to have those sorts of discussions.

What you're describing is "that heap of Nazis over there". It doesn't matter if the deplatformed people pop back up in marginal, poorly connected hate-tolerant sites. That actually helps. They have been successfully "sent to Coventry" in a place where their cultural impact is nil.

I don't know on what basis you think that their cultural impact is nil.

Because they're left in a situation where the only people they're able to talk to are already-committed Nazis.

Some of those have indirect diffusion paths back out into the mainstream culture. But the direct ones are blockaded.

Is the voting booth not direct enough for you?

So we don't have to worry about Nazis anymore? I'm glad to learn that; somehow I had been misinformed by the newspapers.

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