As far as I see that instance is a far-right cess pool. Everything I’ve got from that instance were low-quality transphobic “news articles”.
As far as I see that instance is a far-right cess pool. Everything I’ve got from that instance were low-quality transphobic “news articles”.
A lot of free speech arguments falter in situations like these, imo, since they are predicated on the speech involved being genuine feelings/ideas/emotions. Troll groups like explodingheads and /r/the_donald are/were less about exchanging ideas and more about inflicting ideas on others. When the_donald was isolated, their community essentially started to die because there wasn’t much genuine interest in discussing politics - their only interest was in ‘redpilling normies’.
Ugh. Time to post that always relevant Sartre quote again. I hate that it’s still relevant almost 80 years later:
The entire concept of democracy has a core concept of everyone working together for the common good.
Which doesn’t work when one side of the spectrum is trying to burn everything down for short term profit and power madness.
I think it’s really dangerous to dismiss the speech they spread as not their genuine feelings/ideas/emotions, because even if the troll doesn’t believe it personally, by spreading it anyway, they are absolutely bolstering those who do, and there are many.
You have to look at where these ideas are born from and who benefits from them, not pretend no one actually holds them because that’s demonstrably not true.
I should refine what I said. I think they genuinely believe many of the things they espouse, but (1) they espouse many things they don’t believe in an effort to bring in outsiders with less harsh ideas before acclimating them to the intensity (“I’m as gay and liberal as they come, but even I can see how the trans movement has become largely exclusionary and radical”) and (2) this is more about what the purpose of the community is, rather than the individuals. The individuals that are trolls can just be blocked, even if it becomes tedious when they grab new accounts. The community itself has a purpose, however, and that purpose can be either focused “internally” (members are discussing things amongst themselves) or “externally” (members largely discuss how to affect other communities). I think worries about freedom of speech or the silencing of honestly held (and expressed) beliefs are largely worried about the former (which may be more earnest), but a lot of the toxic communities are the latter, where there is very little that is expressed in earnest on the platform, because earnest conversations aren’t the purpose of the community. They’re little more than staging grounds on a given platform to try and either recruit outsiders or annoy their political opponents. I think this last aspect is the worst part, since communities like the_donald only really shared a communal love of annoying ‘the libs’ or left wing ideas in general, and the only purpose of the community was to be shitty.
I agree with you there (especially on that last point - they literally come looking for us so they can bully us then claim victim. every. fucking. time.) and appreciate the clarification, I think this kind of nuance is important to get in to especially when there seems to be a rise in bad faith users in these discussions (and those who are perhaps on the fence, who they target with their playing down of the hate).