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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

Ok, except that you 1) just made this up from whole cloth and 2) have missed the point of deplatforming entirely. Deplatforming trashbags reduces their reach. It doesn't need to change their minds. The trashbag is one person. The gullible are many.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...

> I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.

It's very convenient that you then handwave away the very reason why this is wishful thinking.

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Reach is key, IMHO. Freedom of speech, already a very different thing in the US and Europe for example, is about being allowed to say what you want, with certain country specific restrictions. It doesn't mean to be granted access to biggest platforms with the highest reach out there to spread your opinion. Which is fine, as far as I am concerned.

> merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

Keep them on or they will radicalize more? That just sounds silly.

Let them radicalize. See how that works when they don't have a voice.

I agree with you, but I think you should rewrite your comment to be less aggressive.

If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source. And Vice ain't it.

> If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source.

Vice in this article links to evidential sources while summarizing the findings. You should bother reading it and what it links to.

ALSO, and this is a bug fucking also, that's not how the burden of evidence for claims works! You just argued against falsifiability! OP is responsible for providing evidence for their own made up claim!

I was responding to you, not the OP. Most statements on HN are not immediately backed by sources, as this is not a scientific forum. But if you are just gonna tell someone they are full of shit, you should have some solid data behind it rather than a questionable clickbait rag that may or may not be cherry picking and massaging its own sources.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” - Hitchens's razor.

The burden of proof is always on the person making an assertion or proposition. When they do not provide proof of their claim, and another person calls it "full of shit", it is not valid to shift the burden of proof onto them to disprove the original claim.

And there's a great reason for this - the bullshit asymmetry principle: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

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