EDIT: no, I don't sympathize with nazis (neither I sympathize with those who call everyone nazi when they're losing an argument ;)
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
657 points (70.5% liked)
Memes
45680 readers
567 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Besides: De-Federating is a mistake. That'll lead to them reinforcing their bullshit unchallenged inside of their echo chambers and draw in everyone who comes by and stays long enough. That's exactly what strengthens the AFD in Germany or certain religious groups in the US. 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.
De-federating so you don't see them and then pretending that solves anything is like throwing a blanket on a unexploded bomb that has slammed into your bedroom: You can pretend it's not there all your want, until one day where the cover is being lifted rather radically.
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:
Banning an entire bigoted instance from yours, i.e. defederating, will accomplish the goal of reducing and removing bigoted behavior from your instance.
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.
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.