I was pretty gung-ho about the free speech aspect of it but I feel differently now. There are a couple of sites radicalizing kids and there’s a huge difference between child-friendly and killing the hate machine.
Those sites exist specifically because all the popular ones specifically are designed to be echochambers, and boot the "controvercial" users off. So those users collectively move to other sites and start their own echochamber. And then when new people join, they arent seeing both sides of the conversation, which is a clear path to radicallization.
The way to fix this isnt with silencing, its by exact opposite -promoting controvercy and rewarding discussion around it while punishing low effort posts and replies.
In context, 4chan can be a useful toy to teach about ideology. Ideology is any belief system where the fundamental ideas are defended with insults, censorship, and threats. There are many banned ideologies on display on 4chan that are disallowed on other platforms where they are exclusively countered with insults, threats and censorship.
Without criticism and challenge by other ideological belief systems, mainstream liberal ideology can easily fall into things like Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. That was a politically enforced non-belief in genetics in plants. Lysenko believed for example that plants could change species by being exposed to cold temperatures. Stalin was a fan, so everyone that criticized Lysenko was persecuted until finally the Soviets came to their senses after years of poor agricultural performance and failed experiments. There are a lot of these types of ideologically unquestionable beliefs in the west. That you probably already know what they are shows how deep and obvious the defects are.
No, while I would say 4chan could be illustrative, it’s not by any means a good example tool or useful to teach.
The right way is to teach about philosophy (and the many different philosophies) and the merits in using argumentation based on reasoning and understanding of the topic, as well as becoming aware of fallacies and bad faith discussion.
> Ideology is any belief system where the fundamental ideas are
defended with insults, censorship, and threats.
This is a distorted and negative interpretation of the word
"ideology". Please try not to misuse the word pejoratively, as
anti-idealism, being itself an ideology, places you in a somewhat
paradoxical stance. :)
Many ideologies are positive, humanistic and rest on rational well
argued and widely accepted values.
Here is a fairly neutral explanation of the word "ideology" with some
examples to help you appreciate its scope [1].
what's more desirable: having all of the extremists congregate on one big website or shut that website down and have a diaspora of different, smaller sites that are even more extreme?
Speaking from 30+ years being online in one form or another: That doesn't work. It has never worked. The public know censorship when they see it and correctly identify it as weakness. It doesn't silence dissent -- it encourages it.
That's why great care is taken that they don't see it. How often do you, on Facebook or Twitter, see "This message has been censored/had its visibility limited due to [reasons]"?
They put up fact-checks under a post sometimes, but what those fact-checks mean for the visibility of a post is left to your imagination. If a post or link is outright censored, you don't find out about it until you try to post it. As their censorship intruded even into so-called private messages on those platforms, even in a 1-to-1 conversation, sending something prohibited doesn't show any kind of "Prohibited content censored" message to the recipient (even non-spam).
They'd much rather you don't know they're censoring anything.
They would, yes, but obviously they're not very good about it. Everyone knows they're doing it, and on what basis, too, which rather defeats the purpose and clues people in that there is something about that message which is dangerous to the interests of the censoring party. And here's the thing: The reason everyone knows about it is that on a long enough timeline everyone posts something that offends the perpetually offended.
