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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> My point still is, if you force these people into places like that, where their plans are easily observable, and 99% of people wont go there then it will fester in silence.

Good.

Better they fester in silence in a place where they can be observed and reported to authorities when they cross the line. Without a popular, legitimate, high traffic platform that allows them to influence a mass audience the cancer doesn't metastasize.

I can't banter my own mother into giving up whatever conspiracy theory crosses her path. There are so many people with equally poor fact-checking and critical thinking skills that they form their own festering bubbles on popular platforms. The bigger the bubbles, the more extreme they get, and now the end result is a confederacy of deluded, violent extremists sacking the capitol. We're lucky it wasn't worse, but this might be a dress rehearsal for far more violence if we don't get a better grip.

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Please read a history book, preferably one written in the last century.

Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.

At least 75,000,000 people think one way. Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?

I gather, as a late night estimate, 75,000,000 people talking to about another 55,000,000 people why they are right.

And you want to force them all into darkness, unable to engage in the political discussion.

Madness. Absolute Madness.

> Please read a history book, preferably one written in the last century.

I've read quite a few, and they don't bear out your description at all.

> Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.

Not really, not really, and really not.

> At least 75,000,000 people think one way

74,222,593 people conclude, for a wide variety of different reasons, at a particular point in time, to vote for a particular candidate. But even those 74,222,593 people don't “think one way”; if that wasn't obvious from, oh, actually listening to them at the time or having a basic understanding of humans, it's pretty damn obvious right now, when in defeat the Republican Party which was, if nothing else, pretty unified in electoral support for Trump, (much less the broader group of Trump voters which necessarily included a substantial number of non-Republicans) has been turned against itself with great intensity by Trump’s post-election actions, starting with the election challenges and escalating through the Trumpist attack on the Capitol.

> Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?

No one is interested in denying the vast majority of the people who supported Trump in the last election the right to speak openly. You are railing against a strawman.

I'm not really 'railing' about anything, just thinking out loud. Thanks

> At least 75,000,000 people think one way. Deny them the right to speak openly and what might you have?

Nobody is denying these people the right to speak openly, and it's ridiculous to paint with this broad of a brush. The overwhelming majority people are perfectly decent, have normal lives, and don't go around making violent threats or spreading absurd, easily disproven conspiracy theories.

There is an infinitesimal minority who are toxic, deluded extremists. Giving them equal footing on huge platforms with global reach helps them spread their poisonous ideas to a still-minority, but vastly larger group. That subsequent small minority which they infect are able to wreak much greater havoc. Parler was a perfect example of this in action.

> Human societies are cyclical, repeatable, and to some degree, predictable.

To this point, I would direct your attention to the Rwandan genocide, a perfect example of what can happen when you give a mass media platform to people who advocate murderous extremism. The genocide was incited by extremist radio shows spouting conspiracy theories and hatred.

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