Comment by vintermann
5 months ago
So deplatforming works, unless people become so unhinged at the efforts to shape them that they do crazy stuff like buy major media platforms? Guess what, they do!
But at least the Covid dissenter deplatforming worked, right? Or was the problem Musk there again?
One of my mantras is that powerful people believe all the crazy things regular people believe in, they just act differently on them. I think both Musk and Kennedy are great examples that you'd appreciate, as are Xi and Putin with their open mic life extension fantasies.
It's not long ago that Musk and even Trump himself, was aligned with your competent technocrats wielding the "suppression of irresponsible speech" powers.
I'm saying that Trump's re-election is not a compelling counter-example to the general argument for banning disinformation, because he was "re-"platformed for over a year by the time of the election.
You underestimate how much seeing a sitting president be deplatformed affected the voting public. It wasn’t just Musk, all this talk of “deplatforming” people on the right was an obviously clear erosion of free speech that pushed many moderates like myself rightward.
It wasn’t just banning Trump either, tbh one of the biggest ones was the banning of the Babylon Bee for a pretty tame joke. There’s a long list of other right-leaning accounts which were banned during that time as well.
I mean, who knows how well Trump would have done had he not been re-admitted to Twitter. It's a counter-factual. For what it's worth, I'm not advocating de-platforming right-wing voices. I just think there's an argument to be made that social media platforms have a responsibility to mitigate misinformation and incitements to violence. It should be done in a transparent and impartial manner. There are high-profile right-wing accounts that spread a lot of misinformation trying to whip up a frenzy. In the UK, Musk's un-banning brought accounts like Katie Hopkins, Andrew Tate, and Tommy Robinson back online, a consequence of which was a series of violent riots last summer fuelled by false claims and Islamophobia. I hear people arguing that as long as anyone can share their ideas, then the truth will bubble to the top. Well, that's not how it's playing out.
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