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> What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to le
by dwild 7y ago
> What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to let them post elsewhere so they can only post on 8chan, and that some of them, mentally unstable, react to being outcast in extreme ways?
The thing is, their argument is often not coherent or unfunded and once public, will be shown wrong pretty quickly (sadly not always with the right words or the right ways) and they'll feel attacked because of that.
On theses platforms, that doesn't happen, people are cheering them, they feel right, they feel it's the correct way of thinking. Thus they go there instead because it feel good.
The best example is r/the_donald banning any opposite way of thinking.
They are also slowly self-justifying isolating themselve from others, accusing others of manipulations, of fake news, using conspiration theories to ignore facts, accusing people of "concern trolling", etc...
That's sadly quite hard to fix and you'll need quite a b it of motivation and original thinking to be able to go beyond all theses walls they build arround themselves to protect their hatred and their little communities.
- mikedilger 7y agoI absolutely agree. I think if they self-select to group with their own kind they radicalize each other. But there is not much we can do about that because no matter how many forums get shut down another one will pop up. The community itself doesn't go away just because a platform goes away, that just aggravates them. The best opportunity we have to help normalize them is while they are on public platforms like twitter, youtube and facebook. Unfortunately those platforms have chosen to ban accounts rather than just censor and throttle content (for reasons that make perfect commercial sense). And good-faith statements of bad ideas are not being engaged with because they get censored as well (obviously bad faith trolling and memes don't invite engagement). IMHO the best response is to engage where engagement is invited (everyone is edified by such discussions), censor where it isn't invited and where it is otherwise necessary to censor, throttle the ability of repeat offenders to post... but never perma-ban accounts. In summary I guess my point is this: We can't stop them from choosing to go into a dark corner, but we can stop pushing them there.