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>As I've said, in my opinion the increasing division is partly a result of the fact that radical minorities nowadays have platforms through which they can easil
by sleepysysadmin 6y ago
>As I've said, in my opinion the increasing division is partly a result of the fact that radical minorities nowadays have platforms through which they can easily reach millions.[1]
this is the funny thing. Trump and the right wing are the ones being banned but it's the democrats who have created the divide.
> I agree that this is technically non-trivial, but many experiences have been made already and there are many methods like moderation, karma systems, IP banning, shadow-banning, banning by degrading service, limiting amplification/re-distribution of messages, identifying sockpuppet and bot accounts, and so on.
I also find it funny that to justify banning and other moderation that it's only being done to the 'radical minority' but it's absolutely not. This is about political opposition being silenced.
Which again comes back to the first problem. The political division in 2019 was 100% democrats. In 2021? Not 100% democrats anymore. The republicans are now adding to the division and that's not going to end well.
Attempting to silence them will never work.
- jonathanstrange 6y agoI was only talking about radicalized people who are advocating violence or are completely detached from reality (e.g. people who claim Covid-19 does not exist, or people who claim vaccination is a way to implant microchips into people). I have not talked about the political opposition in general. Your claims about 100% divides are or who caused it, as far as I can see, completely made up and without any evidential support. As I've said, it's also irrelevant who "causes a divide." The political divide is between two sides, so of course both of them are affected and responsible for it. I argued that the divide is partly a consequence of how social media work, because these allow in-group behavior that fosters radicalization. You chose to ignore that argument. Okay, so be it. I certainly don't buy into your argument insofar as I can reconstruct it. You claim that the political opposition is silenced in the US, a claim for which there is zero evidence. Bans and other measures are put out for concrete violations of ToS such as directly inciting violence or advocating a coup d'etat by storming the Capitol to prevent US Congress from certifying an election result. Bans are very rare in numbers on social media. In fact, the people we're talking about already have their social media accounts on Discord and Parler. But it's a good idea to limit their ability to reach millions. That's not even silencing them, it's just common sense. Nobody should have a platform to post vitriol and hatred to millions, these kind of posts play no constructive role in politics whatsoever. On a side note, the vast majority of Republicans is moderate and many of them do not even like Trump, as evidenced by opinion polls who have shown that he's one of the least popular presidents in US history. Trump's fan base is quite small, and the people who were storming the Capitol were an even smaller fraction of that. The problem of the Republican party is a systemic problem of any two-party system and could have just as well happened to the Democrats. Moderate Republicans have to continue to cater to a radical minority because they cannot risk the party to be split. If the Republican party split up into two, then both of these new parties would always lose against the Democratic Party. That explains the complete lack of a spine in many leading Republicans. They do not support Trump, they want to prevent the destruction of their party. The same could happen to the Democrats. It's a general weakness of the US electoral system and the two party division.