Free Speech Wins: Study Reveals Gab’s Edge over Facebook

That's interesting. I've never looked at Gab but I've seen FB posts with comments that got just stupid nasty.

I finally started using that "block" option a lot faster and put an end to that.

Even if you disagree with gab and what people are saying there, you can acknowledge and observe the ways and language that people use there. It seems like (I've never been to the site) people there are relatively civil with each other, compared to Facebook.

I think its interesting for the commentary about radicalisation, seems like it's saying a community that is more like each other is often happier. Diversity brings division with social media. The drive to include all people and expand and grow from venture capitalism might be the thing that makes social media platforms die.

We did see Facebook try to address this pre 2020 with its change of focus on the news feed to just be friends and family but they appear to have gone back on this to increase engagement. I think we have seen the same with Twitter. Mastodon with it's self-curated instances with lots of censorship making communities coherent and isolated from people not like themselves seems like it's going the right way, but it could be that the user group is small and all reasonably similar minded at this early stage.

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From the paper about gab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10390321/

"This explains that extremism, in all its forms, is a cumulative and incremental phenomenon or a process that arises or amplifies as a reaction to exposure or prolonged contact with an ideologically different type"

"The lack of radicalization of communication may be associated with the sharing of opinions regarding particular themes and the non-existence of users who can counter them."

"gab...generates a discussion environment that is less polarized and more open to the exchange of opinions"

"facebook.. generating a polarization of positions that in a short time turns into hate speech, thus preventing a meaningful contest between different opinions"

But do we have a free speach?! What defines free speach in the first place?! Because per all these “free speach advocates” platforms, it goes “as long as it’s not illegal then post it”, but what’s legal/illegal now can change in the future or wasn’t the same in the past, rendering these platforms only chatting in the margins of what they are allowed to chat on and/or preying on the poor/weak say race based “free speach” but never a class based free speach because it is obviously illegal to do so. So that “free speach” is just an illusion or controlled one.

Same for racism, same for sexism, same for hate in general. At this point I will just state that either you know the reason or your don't. What is quite concerning is that a lot of alleged domain experts tend to be in the later camp and we saw a lot of censorship in recent years. These are complex social dynamics, but the loudest voices in these debates failed to provide sensible and working solution against polarization.