3 ms·
We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually t
by dangerlibrary 5y ago
We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually the result of a successful de-platforming effort.
- api 5y agoNo, but given that the spread of these things through social networks resembles infectious disease we can take an educated guess. I'd propose that deplatforming probably stretched out the curve. I suppose an argument could still be made from that. Maybe without stretching out the curve we would have seen significant loss of life on January 6th from many more thousands of Q people marching on the capital and eventually being hurt or killed in confrontations with capital police and the national guard. That would not have been good, though it would have in the long term perhaps more deeply discredited the movement. We can never live the counterfactual with history.
- gogithefish 5y agoPossibly. Also important to note that by responding improperly to such threats, the institutions themselves end up weakening themselves. For example, instead of being honest about what vaccines can and can't do, they pre-empt the dumbest arguments by pretending vaccines are perfect. Once some (reasonable) limits to efficacy become known, the institutions are completely discredited and the anti-vaxxer meme becomes even more powerful.