Technology

I agree it's murky. Though I'd like to note that when you shift hateful ideologues to dark corners of the internet, that also means making space in the main forums for people who would otherwise be forced out by the aforementioned ideologues - women, trans folks, BIPOC folks, anyone who would like to discuss xyz topic but not at the cost of the distress that results from sharing a space with hateful actors.

When the worst of the internet is given free reign to run rampant, it has a tendency to take over the space entirely with hate speech because everything and everyone else leaves instead of putting up with abuse, and those who do stay get stuck having the same, rock bottom level conversations (e.g. those in which the targets of the hate are asked to justify their existence or presence or right to have opinions repeatedly) over and over with people who aren't really interested in intellectual discussions or solving actual problems or making art that isn't about hatred.

But yeah, as with anything involving large groups of people, these things get complicated and can be unpredictable.

The problem when you own a space that if you let certain groups of people in, such as, in this example, Nazis, you'll literally drive everyone else away from your space, so that what started off as a normal, ordinary space will become, essentially, a Nazi bar.

It's not only Nazis — it can be fascists, white supremacists, meth-heads, PUAs, cryptocurrency fanboys — some groups will be so odious to others that they will drive everyone else from your space, so the only solution that you can enact is to ensure that they don't come to your place, even if they're nice and polite and "follow your rules", because while they might, their friends won't, those friends have a history of driving away other people from other spaces.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

What evidence did you find to support Substack’s claims? They didn’t share any.

You can quickly and easily find good evidence for things like Reddit quarantining and the banning of folks like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Which claims are empirical again?

we also do know that going after nazis and white supremacists works since all through the 90s they were relegated to the fringe of the fringe corners on the internet.

There’s a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I’m unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not “solve the problem” – how do we really know?

Well it depends what you define as "the problem".

If you define it as Nazis existing per se, banning them does not "solve the problem" of nazis existing. They will just go elsewhere. A whole world war was not enough to get rid of them.

However, allowing them on mainstream platforms does make their views more prevalent to mainstream users and some might fall for their propaganda similar to the way people get attracted to the Qanon nonsense. So if you define the problem as "Nazis gaining attention" then yeah sure. It certainly does "solve the problem" to some degree. And I think this is the main problem these days (even in the Netherlands which is a fairly down to earth country, the fascists gained 24% of the votes in the last election!)

However however you define "the problem" making money off nazi propaganda is just simply very very bad form. And will lead to many mainstream users bugging out, and rightly so.