That and 8chan. Did we all collectively forget about 8chan? Functionally, I was hoping it would be like lemmy. It quickly turned into a place where every racist, violent, pedophile trickled into once they were deplatformed. Now they just use facebook/ Twitter.
That’s the problem with ‘deplatforming.’
The crazies migrate to another platform and then that platform gets bigger and crazier and perhaps eventually competes with the original, more mainstream platforms.
We need some sort of “immune system” to handle these extremes, deplatforming is kinda like moving the disease to another part of the body where there is no “immune system”. Defederating might create the same effect.
I don’t know how to handle it, but we might need more “normal” average people participating in a compassionate understanding way, with those that have lost their way. Because right now there are plenty of Russian bots that encourage the wildest conspiracies and world views, but also plenty of people with idle time on their hands encouraging it also.
We will meet this challenge more and more as the fediverse grows. At this moment it’s not worth the investment to spread misinformation probably.
It might also be necessary to find new ways of discussion that do not favor short, emotionally impactful but factually wrong arguments so much. Our political discussions tend to have a lot of repetition all over the place anyway that is a waste of our collective time.
We even forgot about Twitter during Trump‘s campaign and first term. No way anyone remembers 8Chan.
Lowtax banning hentai on something awful was the catalyst for the acceleration of fascism in the US.
Gamergate was at least easy to ignore. I still don’t really know what it was about. Always seemed like pointless internet drama to me. That may or may not be true but it hasn’t been a problem to stay ignorant about the topic. You can’t ignore what’s happening now unless you don’t use the internet at all and even that isn’t going to be completely effective.
I literally did not know about the facts of gamer gate until like two years ago. It was all Twitter bullshit, and that’s why I had no idea what it was. Some of the people involved made a living out of it is seems.
Yeah I heard some stuff about it at the time but not much. About 5 years later I started reading an article about it but only got like 2 paragraphs in before I remembered why I never paid attention to it the first time around and quit reading.
It was about incels spouting misogyny and all other imaginable forms of bigotry. It served as yet another fascism pipeline for a lot of kids.
MAGA:
- Make
- America
- Gamergate
- Always
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