EDIT: no, I don’t sympathize with nazis (neither I sympathize with those who call everyone nazi when they’re losing an argument ;)

  • yukichigai@kbin.social
    30·
    1 year ago

    On the contrary, deplatforming works very well. In the wake of Reddit banning FatPeopleHate and CoonTown the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study on walling off and removing “safe spaces” for bigots:

    Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit.

    More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage.

    In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem.

    Banning an entire bigoted instance from yours, i.e. defederating, will accomplish the goal of reducing and removing bigoted behavior from your instance.

    • Norgur@kbin.social
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yes, it worked for the platform. It didn’t make the bigots go away. They just withdrew. No one actually changed their mind by being banned. They will just move to ever smaller platforms until they land on a platform where they are the only crowd and there they will keep reinforcing each other, leading to more radicalization.

      That’s exactly what I said: defederating will make the problem invisible to you, but the hateful bigots will still exist.

      • kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world
        16·
        1 year ago

        I’m tired of people thinking that racists and bigots and morons deserve a warm shoulder to vent to. It isn’t anyone’s responsibility to make someone be something they aren’t, and it’s really suspicious anytime someone tells you that you should be nice, or hear out, or let join people that hold disgusting views.

          • ieatpillowtags@lemm.ee
            3·
            1 year ago

            “ The only chance you have against them is engaging them and hack off little chips of their construct of lies and hatred until it hopefully collapses.”

            That’s exactly what you’re saying.

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        1 year ago

        They will become more radical, but they will be prevented from radicalizing others. When normal people encounter the now hyper-radicalized members of the deplatformed groups, they will tend to write them off as the crazed radicals that they are.

        Convince those who you can. Exile those who are too far gone. Doing the opposite in either instance is harmful.

      • yukichigai@kbin.social
        12·
        1 year ago

        Why is it every instance admin’s responsibility to fix bigots? What is it about running a Lemmy instance that obligates people to actively work to find the one glimmer of redeeming quality in these human septic tanks? Why should the targets of their hatred have to do all the work to avoid being victimized?

        Well it isn’t, nothing does, and they shouldn’t. Bigots are the ones in the wrong here, and kicking them out works plenty well. Bigots spread by being given platforms. Take away even one of those and it lessens the spread.

        “We shouldn’t have echo chambers” is just propaganda from bigots who were upset that their soapboxes got taken away. Stop falling for it.