Based on what I've seen and people I know who were active on Gab and Parler I would venture to say it's not nearly as high as people think. The amount of people with truly fringe beliefs is pretty small, even when concentrated.
And I'd personally much rather have this small group of people outletting their anger onto the internet instead of IRL.
Pushing them further and further into a corner with ever expanding censorship and expecting them to become good tolerant citizens has always seemed like a fools game to me.
Venting anger on the internet and it producing no real change isn’t an “outlet”, its just a pressure cooker.
> Pushing them further and further into a corner with ever expanding censorship and expecting them to become good tolerant citizens has always seemed like a fools game to me.
Containing the various white supremacist / conspiracy cults isn’t about reforming them, its about reducing their ability to recruit and radicalize. While reforming those already in the cults would be nice, its mostly a lost cause. They aren’t, for the most part, going to become “good, tolerant citizens”.
Also, receiving thousands of threats and being doxed "onto the internet" has very serious consequences IRL.
IRL they're limited physically to whoever they can reach; online they can make their hate travel the world ( point in case, there were QAnon related actions in Germany! If the Q people had been purely IRL that would have never happened)
Aside: Gab is horrible technically speaking; Firefox uses my full CPU :-/