My current view is that while I want to promote openness and free speech that can really only work in a context where the person exercising their speech feels some necessity to use it responsibly and in an honest way.
On the internet that takes a lot of self control because the social norms of every day life don’t always apply because:
- no one knows who you are
- there is not a human being right in front of you that you might feel empathy for
- there are no consequences to anything you say
- not all posts are even by humans.
With all these taken together there is a compelling argument that speech may need to be more highly regulated on the internet than in face to face interactions. However there are people with legitimate ( beliefs and ideas honestly held that they wish to discuss ) views that I worry are going to be silenced and further marginalized.
This is bad for society because if people get dismissed or pushed aside it just breeds resentment, distrust, and more misunderstanding. I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.
For instance "we think they are being racist" or "they are spreading misinformation" could have unintended consequences. Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination. However if these are honestly held beliefs that they are willing to engage in civil discourse around I don't think it's right to actually block them.
This is likely just the beginning of a much larger discussion so what are your thoughts?---
I worry that this "banish them to the corner" policy will combine with rapidly changing limits on acceptable speech and thought to hand the extremists a growing captive audience of resentful exiles. Is it really worth banishing Jane Churchlady if the price is making Gab a mainstream social network?
Much easier to "capture" an audience if you're given a platform to speak to said audience.
I've mentioned this example before so pardon me if you've read it already. We had a far right party getting covered by medias in Canada during last federal election because our laws made it an obligation to give them coverage. They didn't win a single seat and media don't have to give them any attention anymore. The leader went from doing live sessions with thousands of watchers and tweets getting thousands of likes to getting a couple hundreds of each with numbers constantly going down.
Stop giving extremists a public and only the small percentage that's truly extreme will keep supporting the movement, give them a public and you'll have people that are on the fence that will fall on their side.
Heck, the USA had the KKK in the streets decades ago, that didn't go away by trying to compromise with them! But now that people who hold the same beliefs have a platform (Facebook, Twitter, Gab...) they're back in the streets, just not dressed with a white hood!
I think we might be arguing two slightly different things here. You're worried about the consequences of not shunning extremists hard enough to keep groups that are already down, down. I'm worried about the consequences of shunning people who are neither bien-pensants nor extremists as extremists, because it's a strong incentive for the mal-pensants to support the extremists if not become extremists.
Also, your argument turns on the assumption that the extremists are incapable of making their own platforms and must rely on platforms offered by others. My argument is that if you deplatform anyone within eyesight of an extremist, it's a matter of time before you've deplatformed so many people that they build their own successful platform. And the platform of the deplatformed will be ugly.
not to mention that as times change, you may eventually find yourself deplatformed as well
Yeah, by extremists, which is more a badge of honor than anything else when you're close to center.
No way your argument to tolerate racists, homophobes and misogynes is "someday people who have opposite values might be deplatformed!"