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Comment by iab | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I have heard deplatforming being touted as a long-term way to fix anything. All the efforts so far seem very “last-ditch”, which probably doesn’t bode well

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That's because de-platforming doesn't actually fix anything. Instead of refuting the idea on its merits and allowing there to be a logical destruction of extremist views, de-platforming just turns people into "martyrs" for their cause.

Good. They can go be martyrs in their own little extremist shitholes and only affect the like-minded.

Maybe they can write books about their struggles in jail. I’m sure nothing bad could come from it.

The lesson of Hitler in this particular case isn't that Hitler shouldn't have been put in jail, it's that he should have been put in jail even longer.

Hitler was purposely given a short sentence and little oversight in jail, allowing him to meet with other fascists and write his book, by the judge and guards who were sympathetic to his message. Hardly deplatforming.

You say that and then act shocked when inevitably someone stabs or shoots a bunch of people.

They live among everyone else and many need help, never forget that.

Mental health does need a lot of improvement in the USA especially, and the police need access to extremists who are plotting violence, that is true. Social media is _not_ a good place for either though.

Nobody cares about the merits. That's not how arguments have worked for a long, long time. Now it's about red vs. blue, name-calling, post-hoc rationalization, and getting so wound up that every disagreement becomes an existential threat. At best you'll get some cherry-picked "evidence" that has a non-zero chance of already having been retracted.

Yeah. People apparently believe they're above debating these so called extremists. They've already decided who's right and who's wrong. There's plenty of people who aren't sure and who will wonder what's up when some community gets censored.

I also object to the way they censor others. People act like mobs on social media. Over the years I observed lots of open source developers get mobbed because they shared some wrongthink on Twitter or whatever, or because they refused to accept some code of conduct, or even because of innocuous comments. It sucks.

"I had Covid and it was just 3 days of mild fever"

This always attracts the panicky lil shits who think it's the end of the world and tell me I'm a dumb antivaxxer. There's more of them than me, so I'm an extremist now.

I've posted about vaccines before. Pointed out the fact that like everything in medicine they have risks and benefits. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, we still don't fully understand either. We're discovering the risks as we go along by observing what happens to the humans who took those shots.

Apparently I'm an extremist spreading misinformation. Why else would I get downvoted?

You can't reason a person out of a position they didn' reason themselves into. By engaging in low effort obviously crazy stories like the Sandy Hook conspiracy, you give it credibility, you make it a two sided debate, on equal footing. If that worked we wouldn't have flat earthers and Q people.

Martyrs with very limited reach is a decent compromise.

It depends on what you mean by long-term, I'd guess.

Does it fix the problem completely? No.

Is it better than letting them spew unfiltered nonsense to everyone? Yes.

It worked out great to burn William Tyndale for heresy. Right?

I am not advocating burning people.

>” Is it better than letting them spew unfiltered nonsense to everyone? Yes.”

Just think of how much we accept as the truth today would be considered “unfiltered nonsense” in the past. Doctors washing hands between surgeries? Plate tectonics? Evolution? An elected executive instead of a King?

I can go on and on, but if society adopts a heavy handed approach to ‘heresy’ we’re going to snuff out any ability to change our views and genuinely reevaluate the beliefs we hold to be true. Otherwise we risk everything becoming pure dogma.

> Is it better than letting them spew unfiltered nonsense to everyone? Yes.

Do you have evidence for that belief, or does it just feel right?

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