A viewpoint being controversial isn’t enough of a reason to dismiss or deplatform it. A viewpoint being completely unsupported (by more than other opinions), especially one that makes broad, unfalsifiable claims is worth dismissing or deplatforming.
Disinformation and “fake news” aren’t legitimate viewpoints, even if some people think they are. If your view is provably false or if your view is directly damaging to others and unfalsifiable, it’s not being suppressed for being controversial, it’s being suppressed for being wrong and/or dangerous.
Cube6392@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
The problem with that is that bad faith actors engage in bad faith arguments for a reason. They just want a few people to hear them. It doesn’t matter that the majority of people who hear them see through their lies. It matters that they reach that small audience. To let that small audience know they’re not alone. The goal is to activate, engage, and coalesce that small audience. This is what the alt-right does. This is what they’ve done since the 1920s. We have 100 years of evidence that you can’t just “Hear out” the Nazis’ opinions without harm coming to real, legitimate people. The best way to deal with bad faith actors is to deplatform them before they’ve achieved a platform
off_brand_@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Also, it’s cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can’t disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.
And I can just come up with some further bullshit that’ll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.
If we gave equal weight to every argument, we’d spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone’s crap.