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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

At the time of posting the front page of voat has the following threads:

A moment of silence for all the FBI glowniggers that just got laid off. - https://voat.co/v/funny/4170215

If you go back to Reddit, you're a double niggerkike - https://voat.co/v/whatever/4170129

Plus a whole lot of misinformation and other crazy mixed in with comments that make youtube look like a bastion of intellectualism. It doesn't look like anything of value has been lost.

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And this is why the right-wing is so up in arms about private sites booting them off their platforms. Because if they have to start their own i.e Voat, Parlor, they will find that they don't have the necessary tech and financial structures to run such a site. So by fighting to stay on Reddit and Facebook, they can freeload off of the other parts of the sites that provide value and can support the marginal cost of their white supremacist subreddit/videos.

That's only part of it, though it is part of it.

Fascists--and Voat is populated largely by fascists and by those for whom fascism is not a dealbreaker--need to seem normal in order to get their hooks into credulous people. When you don't eighty-six the fascists, 1) they bring their friends, and 2) they make new friends, because the garbage they spew is emotionally effective and requires an overwhelming amount of calm and coherent deprogramming to unwind and there's not enough labor available to do that forever.

For a related story, I am always reminded of this. https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

...but wait -there's more!

Not only is that a factor, but they need to be able to disrupt neutral or leftish forums as well. That's why the notion that "only" /pol/ on 4chan is tainted is totally laughable. It's not, they do raids on other boards and are disruptive and the whole site has become garbage.

That is what they want to be able to do on twitter and on facebook -disrupt neutral or left spaces and make them garbage as well.

Banning people from speaking doesn't change their mind. Every single tech site baffled.

Banning them stops them spreading this content on mainstream platforms and stops normal people falling in to the trap. It also makes the site tolerable.

Not everyone is as stupid as you're projecting them to be. You're in a bubble you created yourself.

I'm not really sure how this relates to the parent comment. On that original point, it seems crystal clear that a large chunk of the population is easily impressionable and can get quickly swept up in to batshit insane conspiracy theories and cults. There is no bubble here, we can see by the sheer number of supporters these conspiracy theories have that they are a very serious problem and we need to come up with solutions rather than going "Ah well it'll be alright"

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