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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the biggest argument against deplatforming: it actually makes them cool.

Part of the appeal of these ideologies is clearly that they are offensive, not permitted on mainstream platforms, and therefore are something that their participants can "own" and that won't be co-opted by consumerism.

It's the same thing that fueled "Satanic" rock and similar things. Fascism is devil music. That most people are offended by it and mainstream authorities preach against it is a huge part of its appeal.

Elon Musk might be damaging this a little. It's hard to think you're a rebellious counterculture when you have one of the world's richest men acting as a public torch bearer.

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>> I think this is the biggest argument against deplatforming: it actually makes them cool.

I disagree that it makes them cool. Counter culture generally contributes something different and important enough that it eventually becomes the culture and hence the counter cultural people become 'cool'. Extreme ideology of any kind isn't contributing anything. It's an attempt to feel different/special/part of a group, but there's nothing cultural about it and it's not going to receive any validation from outside the group (that would make it cool).

> I think this is the biggest argument against deplatforming: it actually makes them cool.

The thing that mystifies me is that when parents get in on something it usually nukes the coolness factor, but the far right has an overwhelming supply of 50+ year olds on just about every platform and this has had no impact on its rise in popularity among the teens and twenty-somethings.

One thing the Internet has at least weakened is age stratification in culture, for the simple reason that it's hard to tell how old people are online.

Also I'm not talking so much about Fox News right wingers. I'm talking about the 4chan /pol stuff. The stuff Fox provides is the radio-safe edit.

Those goddamn 13 year old Estonians are at it again! https://estonianworld.com/security/a-global-neo-nazi-organis...

Yup. Teenage edgelords can create international movements now.

That's because Boomer Humor is actually really funny when you get the unsanitized version. The lame Boomer jokes are just the ones that HR approves of.

That type of "cool" is not the threat, becoming mainstream is. A deplatformed niche like a few dozen neo-fascists in a street-fighting gang, can be contained, but if a hateful ideology is plaformed and funded, it can snowball. The crossover point is when it has enough power that moderates join it because of it's ubquity and benefits as if it were a career choice. It's this type of political force that dismantles democracies, encourages pogroms, commits state genocide, creates apartheid systems etc.

Musk's funding of the far right has the much more terrifying trajectory of a Hitler not an Enrique Tarrio.

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