> When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior.

As the article suggests: it's likely they found an off-reddit outlet for the stuff they no longer were able to do on reddit and continued to use reddit for their other interests (well, they left reddit at higher rates, too). That is, if you want to make sure that Twitter's hate speech rules work and make "the world a better place", you also need to look at gab.ai & co at the same time to see whether and how much of the hate speech "moved" and how much simply stopped.

This study confirms that pushing criminals out of one neighborhood "works" - for that one neighborhood. Reddit is such a neighborhood, Twitter is another.

Actually, it specifically neither confirmed nor contradicted that assertion, as it was out of scope to track to other venues, or address the larger problem of the entire society.

But it DID show that providing cesspools does increase the behavior of swimming in cesspools, AND show that moderation has an effect.

Providing mainstream venues for anti-social behavior increases that behavior and harms society.

Sure, it may still exist at the fringes, but the further it is pushed off into the fringes, the greater the effort needs to be made to engage in the behavior. The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.

Similar to smoking in the US, it hasn't been banned, just strongly discouraged in public, and it is now a fringe behavior.

> Actually, it specifically neither confirmed nor contradicted that assertion, as it was out of scope to track to other venues, or address the larger problem of the entire society.

Yes, that's about the study. The article does suggest it:

Of course, it’s not so simple as all that. Naturally, many of the users who previously spewed racial slurs at CT just moved over to Gab or Voat, where their behavior is proudly fostered.

> The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.

Again, that's what needs to be proven. All we know is that they didn't see it on reddit at the same rate, not that it happened less or that fewer new people engaged in hate speech, or that those engaging in it stopped.

Smoking is a great example because NOW ITS A SEXUAL FETISH TOO

When you make something fringe you invite people to fetishize it. All you do is up the ante. Sure, some normies will stop being racists because there’s no longer a place to be racist. But other guys will fetishize racism and shoot up synagogues.

Is the benefit of subtracting normies from racist movements worth the cost of creating people who fetishize racism??????? HARD FUCKING QUESTION IMO!

I think we’d be better off with a million people who are “kinda anti Semitic but not anti Semitic enough to write books about it” than one Henry Ford.

I think pervasive racism does more damage than mass shooters, in total. Push it to the fringes.

I agree pervasive racism does more damage than mass shooters but ONE GUY ON THE FRINGES WHO WRITES A MANIFESTO does more damage than all the mass shooters in the world. See: henry ford. If you push it to the fringes you create henry fords and then we’re REALLY fucked.

and sure, it is so rare that it's virtually unheard of; e.g., I'd never heard about smoking being fetishized in the context of it being discouraged (& while I'm not exactly Mr. Club Scene, I do work to keep aware of trends).

It isn't only subtracting the normies from the racist movement, it is also preventing the medium-core bigots from 'practicing', honing, and exaggerating their racism.

If we are to attribute a cause to the rash of current racist murders lately, they are clearly NOT from Reddit recently banning two subs, but far more likely from the entire environment being pushed towards more open racism & bigotry from the chair of the POTUS, to a major Faux News source, to rampant online environments like 4Chan, Voat, etc. Far more likely that these enhanced cesspools and the more approving political environment are the cause than merely one source going offline (particularly since they started occurring before they went offline).

Some probably did. But I wager many didn’t bother and only partook in the bigotry as long as it was easy. In other words, they were ”casual” bigots. Enablers, not instigators. The social dynamics of bullying and related antisocial behavior are fairly well understood.