A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to actually engage with the real logic of an anti-racist argument. Instead, people use heuristics for this sort of work. In my ideal world, the question of "was this on a big site? or some little blog and/or known racist publication?" would serve as a useful heuristic re: what arguments to bother with. This is how newspapers generally settled out. Is it in the paper? If yes, then there are at least some standards. If no, e.g. if it's some vanity publication, then squint a little harder.
These sorts of things have happened every time we've had a big shift in information distribution technology. There's an explosion of ideas with no real markers to differentiate them, and mass chaos for a while as people sort it out. Then eventually people identify the signs of trustworthy info distributors, and it settles back down. If a platform allows racists to flourish, they're not going to remain a place that people can trust. I would like to see Reddit remain a place that has some amount of trust, so I'm happy they banned the really nasty racists.
But reddit is already compartmentalized. Subreddits for fringe ideas are those "plenty of little sites", especially when they are delisted from the front pages.
Racism stems from fear, hate, and deeply embedded cultural tools. You can't "cure" racism through argumentation. Maybe, maybe, you can make people less racist in person -- but on an anonymous forum like Reddit, not a chance.
Don't you see the contradiction here? It can't be both.
The mechanism I'm proposing is that the current generation has not been exposed to many of the toxic things that reinforced racist beliefs. Slavery, segregated schools, etc. Kids in school are taught why those things were bad and why racism is bad. While not all of society has abandoned racism, there's been enough of a push that the public institutions educating the next generation are making efforts to reduce it.
That's all just observational though. Around here it's not so much racism against black folks but rather against aboriginal folk (and to some extent, middle eastern folks). I hear almost none of that crap from my generation or the younger generations, and still hear horrible amounts of it from older generations. Yes, some people in those generations changed, but it sure seems like the "racism rate" is significantly lower than the mean in the younger generations and significantly higher than the mean in the older generations.
Edit: it's also quite possible that it hasn't gone away in the younger generations either, it's just not considered something that is acceptable to say in polite company.
Edit 2: and thank you very much for making me think more about this!
Are individual people any less racist than in the past? Who knows? Probably unprovable.
But our perception of the world is not governed by how people are, it is governed by what people do. And every person has a choice to promote, tolerate, or suppress racism. Choosing the latter is what makes the world seem less racist.
That's not a product of free speech, it's a product of teaching people how to evaluate thoughts they come across in the wild.
Yes they are, because that is exactly what newly-insular racist communities will use to bolster up their ideological positions... Cherry-picked evidence that makes their position look rational.
The idea that no racist is thinking rationally is ridiculous.
To the extent rationality is what got them into their racism, that is exactly the amount that rationality can remove them from racism. By definition.
How has that worked in the past?
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at the chans.
Conveniently these sites are ignored or handwaved away or are somehow only because of censorship.
That may have been correct 50 years ago, but technological changes since then call it into question.
It used to take a fair bit of effort on the part of information purveyors to get their information out to a wide audience. Generally you couldn't just come up with a bad or wrong argument and get it rapidly spread far and wide.
On the receiving end, it took a fair bit of time or effort to access information. We might regularly watch a scheduled TV news broadcast, read a daily newspaper, maybe also read a weekly news magazine to get a broader or deeper perspective, and also maybe read more specialized magazines for news and information on more specialized topics we were interested in. If we needed to go beyond that on a particular topic, we'd have to go to libraries or bookstores.
This combination of bottlenecks on both the production and consumption end meant that generally by the time bad and wrong arguments could start to get traction past a fringe audience there would have been time to develop good and right arguments to counter them, and that people would see those good and right arguments.
Nowadays, the barriers to widespread dissemination of the bad and wrong arguments are way lower. On the receiving end, instead of getting our information by setting aside time each day to read/watch a small number of high quality, consistent sources, many people get their news as a side effect of social activity. It is much less likely now that when they get a link to that bad and wrong stuff that they will also get a link to the good and right refutation. And remember, because the dissemination barriers are much lower now, they are getting the bad and wrong stuff on multiple topics, so even if someone does send them a refutation on one they might be too busy looking at the sensational bad and wrong stuff from another topic to go back and read the refutation of yesterday's stuff.
I think that most people recognize that it is important to be well informed. 50 years ago it took some work to be well informed, so we had to put some thought and effort into becoming so. Now, it is easy to think that you are getting well informed as a side effect of your other activities.
We weren't smarter back then, or less gullible, but there simply was much less of a grey area between uninformed and informed. Now there is a big grey area and it is easy to end up in it. The "let the good and right win out in open public forums" only works if the people in that forum who think they are informed actually are. If they are in that grey area, all bets are off.
The situation 50 years ago did have some problems, mainly that sometimes a thing that is actually good and right appears initially to be bad and wrong, and those barriers that helped keep bad and wrong things from spreading would also slow down those "really good and right but looks bad and wrong" things, too, so it took longer sometimes to adopt new good things.
We've removed that friction...but we've removed too much of it. You need some friction to slow down a bit so that people have time to evaluate and react.
It's not like democracies last forever but I didn't think I'd be alive to watch the point at which people began to reject it.
Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum.