Eliminate? No.
Reduce to the point of practical irrelevance? Yep.
Deplatforming works.
Reduce to the point of practical irrelevance? Yep.
Deplatforming works.
That result makes it more difficult for law enforcement to follow their movements, but it also has the effect of making it more difficult to recruit new members and spread their ideas.
The whole reason social media has been so powerful in spreading ideas, good and bad, is because it reduces communication friction and effort while promoting discoverability. If extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable, and requires more effort on the part of their members. Over time that makes it less likely they'll be able to grow or maintain their numbers.
The easiest enemy to go after is an exposed one. The 2nd is a weak one.
> extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable
Extremist groups do not need to be discoverable. They just need to plant enough conviction into the minds of susceptible and willing hosts. I assure you, not so much energy is required to convert in this case. Certainly not more than religious ones.
Though I need to clarify. When extremism crosses the border of advocating for mass violence. It gains a new universally unambiguous term: terrorism.
These groups want to be on public platforms because their goal is to radicalize people. Or do you think that it was a mistake to kick ISIS and other radical Islam groups off Twitter too?
What do you mean by your statement "not doing those things"?
I hope you know talking about doing something,,, actually doing something,,, and getting caught in the act of doing the "something" are ALL different situations in themselves.
How on earth is equating ISIS members to Gab or even Parler users even remotely the same? It either means you are not aware of the real issue at hand or you seem to have a personal biasness against different political views to yourself.
My point is, Twitter accounts or not, normal (please double bold this word as you read this) people who hold different unpopular views should have the space and freedom to speak their minds.
Unfortunately freedom of speech is a black and white affair. If twitter as a platform doesn't allow their users to legally exercise this right, they might as well come out and freely state they are partisan and include this in their policy. Rather than pretend to be something they are not.
Note: Terrorism is criminalized and well-defined within most state laws. My argument is not in defence of this.
Yep!
> IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas.
The whole point of deplatforming is to prevent those stupid ideas from having a general audience. Sunlight is not always the best disinfectant.
And then suddenly, for no reason at all, someone incredibly well aligned with everyone you deplatformed rises to power.
FPTP is dogshit, agreed. But does even ranked choice voting result in a sane system? I'm not implying it can't. I honestly just don't know.
European ones are decent.
This is such a lazy argument, because it's trivially defeated. Yes. Exactly this. In the same way that e.g. jailing one group (the guilty) is okay, but doing the same for another group (the innocent) is not okay.
"Arbitrary criteria" describes all norms.
You know exactly what I mean, cut the bullshit. Point being, deplatforming may be okay for the group who exercises it, but not for the group that is being deplatformed. Who the fuck decides? The government? Some out of touch Big Tech CEOs? Fuck that.
Just take a look at Venezuela's current "Law against Hatred" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_against_Hatred)to get an idea of how dumb this whole approach is.
Now, if I'd be willing to argue that this is a antitrust issue (FB, TW, Google / Amazon AWS, CloudFlare / PayPal, Stripe / Visa, MasterCard) having too much power to the point that they decide whether you live or not, and that there should be way more alternatives.
> Who the fuck decides? Everyone decides norms in the small bubble around them. When people organize their influence grows too. Some people have too much power. Some people should never have power, like nazis.
A lot of the arguments in this thread you will notice are about whether deplatforming makes nazis less nazis. Well, that's not the point. The point is to make sure they aren't accepted, that they can't use the public square to recruit and gain power.
Some would argue that this is ineffective, but they are now stuck in the bind of thinking that access to places of public discourse is both an important right and also practically unimportant.
Maybe they're too young to remember the holocaust deniers on use usenet or how ineffectual stormfront was before 4chan and before mass social media. People who are hungry for power will try to gain it in the easiest ways possible.
If you think them having power would suck, then you want to make it harder for them.
I simultaneously think facebook and twitter and CBS and fox news etc. have too much control over public discourse and also don't want white supremacists to be able to freely use that power to bring back hell on earth. That includes the new york times giving the likes of Richard Spencer space on their page, Tucker Carlson crying about how much white people are under attack and facebook letting white supremacists run recruiting groups thousands in size.
That's exactly what I'm arguing against. That's just your opinion and you treat it like some universal axiom. Same way you treat 'Holocaust deniers' as some kind of monstrous apparitions. You may not agree, that's all.
It's people like you that inspire me to counteract this trend with full force.
> It's people like you that inspire me to counteract this trend with full force.
What does that look like? What actual effects on the world do you try to make or support others making because I am opposed to fascism?
We may not agree, but we can't say it's a "fundamental disagreement" if there's so much people rooting for it.
> What does that look like?
1) Disagreeing with people online 2) Opening niche internet forums that are lax on moderation (except for illegal content such as child pornography and direct threats) 3) Investing in hosting/domain registrars/payment processors that don't deplatform because of political stance (e.g., Epik, SkySilk)
I've been doing 1) and 2) for some time now, but I want to do 3) as well. I think it will become very profitable during this decade.
It's OK that some things involve subjective judgment.