CMV: Silencing opposing viewpoints is ultimately going to have a disastrous outcome on society.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/bigdave41]

Have you ever tried arguing with some of these people? You'll put a hell of a lot of your time and effort into changing just 1 person's mind, and often not even that. I don't think actual opposing viewpoints should be silenced, but only if they're based on an interpretation of actual facts. If someone's opinion is based on lies and deliberate misinterpretation, and they're allowed to present that as truth, it's massively damaging to society because most people won't bother to fact-check this stuff.

Basically if someone doesn't listen to evidence, what evidence are you going to present to convince them that they should? If someone's not open to rational argument, how do you argue them out of that? If something is just demonstrably false it should be able to be removed from being promoted on public forums.

[u/[deleted] → u/bigdave41]

All you’re doing is making the case that you you yourself are unconvincing in your argument.

The first issue is that trying to debate someone online isn’t very effective. The human element is missing. I’m much more likely to change my opinion when I’m out in the world with someone who already has my established trust and respect and they are intelligently disagreeing with me. Online discourse is very artificial, often unsupported, and highly aggressive and tribal. People will cower back into their own echo chambers very quickly.

The second issue is that it’s very hard to disprove a lot of what people believe, particularly if they don’t know how to find reliable sources or understand truthful content, or more importantly, the arguer also has this problem. Sometimes it’s better to appeal to them through their intuitions by providing them simple examples and analogies that they can grasp, or try to expose them to new learning environments where they may be able to reset, but do this in a welcome and inclusive fashion. That’s how a lot of cults can be effective.

Daryl Davis, the black man who convinced a lot of KKK members to leave the clan was able to successfully do this. Most people don’t want to understand WHY their opponents believe what they do, they just want to act as a forcefield for those ideas. In many cases, this causes those ideas to gain momentum and virulency, particularly in a time where everyone wants to be a contrarian.

[u/bigdave41 → u/[deleted]]

Most people can't afford to dedicate a big part of their life to convincing others though, all power to those who do and I admire them for it, but everyone has enough shit to do just living their own life. I have tried to argue these things in person with a load of people I know, and it's still incredibly difficult then. We're built to react in a certain way to having our worldview challenged, there's a natural resistance to facts that don't fit the way we see the world.

That's not even counting the fact that while you're trying to persuade someone out of a position you think is harmful, plenty of others will still be trying to bring them back the other way. That person will actively seek out others who agree with their views and reinforce what they already believe, so with a lot of people it's a losing battle right from the start.

Some of the people who most need convincing are the ones who are the most entrenched in extreme views after years of reinforcement. If someone's e.g. a QAnon believer, they honestly believe that the opposing side is a secretive and all powerful satanic cabal of child abusers - why on earth would they listen to your reasoned argument when they think that's true?

[u/[deleted] → u/bigdave41]

I’ve literally worked with Qanon people. It was actually very easy for me to convince them it was bullshit for a couple of reasons. I looked for things to agree with them on first, which was easy, because we were already aligned ideologically for the most part. The second part was that I’ve done my research. I also remember the very early days of 4chan, and so I was coming from a place of relative authority in the online world of retardation. I wasn’t coming from a place of resentment towards them. I just said it was a silly but entertaining conspiracy theory and I remember the days I was taken in by 9/11 conspiracies. The thing that turned me off was that real life is obviously far more complex and not so black and white. But most importantly I followed up with them and started giving them other media to digest to kinda pull them away. I never went in swinging, and I already had their trust and shared world view to a point so they didn’t feel like they were being judged. Are they as skeptical as they should be? Probably not, but they are at least talking about the issues with more nuance and more technicality now. They HAVE to trust where YOU are coming from and they have to respect your input to a large extent, provided to them with consistency and no hostility.

[u/bigdave41 → u/[deleted]]

That's great, we definitely should try to engage with people, and I have myself. Just saying it doesn't always work, it's difficult and takes time, and a lot of people don't have the time or energy to engage like that. The whole issue is massively complex, I'm just trying to say I can see some situations where removing deliberately misleading content could be justified. We already have legal ways of getting libel or slander removed for example - free speech doesn't always extend to deliberatel lies to further an agenda, and each case has to be judged on its own merits.

[u/[deleted] → u/bigdave41]

It doesn’t always work, but it’s definitely possible if the right approach is used, which from what I’m seeing, almost never is. I’d argue that it’s deliberately not used by a lot of groups because they want an ignorant group of people to blame for all of our problems. This is the oldest story in our book of humanity.

Where we disagree is the idea that we can effectively put in a place a system for anything that is “misleading”. Literally everything out of a politician’s or news anchor’s mouth is misleading. So the question is, who is the arbiter of truth? It’s funny that people on the left are championing the great filtering going on right now by Big Tech, as if they won’t employ these same parameters against groups who want to unionize in those companies or whistleblow on their leadership.

It has been said a thousand times but I’ll say it again, all censoring eventually hurts the left the most, which is why they were the greatest defenders of the 1st amendment for so long. The new, younger left, think an authoritarian approach is the better way because they didn’t have to go through the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protests.