But crucially, it also makes it much more difficult for unwitting people to start discovering it. The point is to slow the spread, not to reach the people who are already there.
The idea that the only way to protect unwitting people from falling into some undesirable line of thinking is to limit what they see to the desirable line of thinking seems doomed to fail. Either discourse works and you expect people can be made to come to their own sensible conclusions or discourse doesn't work and every change from the norm must be subversive. I.e. tucking it away doesn't guarantee it ends up less visible to people it just guarantees it will be less visible to the system tucking it away. People are still going to share ideas that don't agree with the majority opinion but now those hearing have zero tools or experience for dealing with such claims.
Memes as viruses seems apt. There's a fine balance between exposure leading to herd immunity, and pure isolation making the entire population susceptible to being swept up in a collective insanity once a novel one emerges or re-emerges from generational turnover (eg Marxism or Nazism.) Anyone pretending like one or the other is a global maximum is wrong, and pulling us closer to something non-balanced creates risk around the worst case befalling us in that regime.
The obvious question in this analogy is if there's anything akin to a vaccine. Well, when it comes to bigotry, I think having people you care about in your life that are in tribes or groups being demonized by bigots is just that. And a society of liberal norms of the free exchange of ideas and democracies acts similar to a culture of hand washing and cleanliness in a society where people are free to interact with the sick.
