However, what they don’t do is convert loads of other people to their way of thinking.

Not everyone leads hard left/right. Most people are centrists. So say you want to be a progressive left, but on issue "x" you don't stand with the left. You can't vocalize this because doing so will have people call you "not really left" or "a bigot" or "not seeing past your privilege."

You can go two ways. You can not want to leave your political home and double down and go harder left ... or you find dissenting voices. If those voices aren't centrists, they're going to be hard right, and people will start to shift their entire political leanings because they want a political home.

People need to be okay with others believing things they don't agree with. Even controversial things. I've noticed people on the left who refuse to be friends with or hand out with people who have different beliefs about certain things .. and that's insane! How do you learn and grow if you cut off everyone with a different opinion than yourself? We're probably all wrong about something.

I’m generally pretty respectful of the idea that people are entitled to make their views public. This is healthy. I don’t think this means that everybody is entitled to have their views broadcast on every platform. Presumably we could agree there’s a line somewhere, at which point it’s acceptable for me, as a company, to refuse to allow views which I consider to be over that line to be broadcast on my platform?

It’s a position of some security to be able to complain that “people on the left who refuse to be friends with or hand out with people who have different beliefs about certain things .. and that's insane”. I belong to at least one minority group. I’m not even what you’d call “left”, but I’d certainly refuse to be friends either someone whose belief was that a group to which I belong should be denied some rights. I’d probably refuse to be friends with people who had certain other views I find particularly offensive too. Is that strange or unhealthy? I’d find it really weird to be friends with someone who held beliefs I find to be grossly offensive.

> I’m generally pretty respectful of the idea that people are entitled to make their views public. This is healthy. I don’t think this means that everybody is entitled to have their views broadcast on every platform. Presumably we could agree there’s a line somewhere, at which point it’s acceptable for me, as a company, to refuse to allow views which I consider to be over that line to be broadcast on my platform?

"Acceptable" is a pretty vague word. What actions are we talking about here? Lobbying and petitioning companies? Boycotting them? Demanding governments regulate speech on their platforms?

It's my opinion that forcing people to propagate ideas they disagree with is just as bad as preventing people from propagating ideas they do agree with: these are two sides of the same coin: free speech. So at the level of government, I would never support laws that forced platforms to allow any sort of speech on their platform.

However, Reddit/Facebook/etc. respond to the demands of their users, so the question I'm trying to answer is: what should we, as users, be demanding?

I think the correct response to hatred isn't to shut them out: that's just responding to hatred with hatred. I think the correct response to hatred is to respond with love: assuage fears, correct ignorance, and help the hateful person to find a better way.

> I’d probably refuse to be friends with people who had certain other views I find particularly offensive too. Is that strange or unhealthy?

This certainly isn't going to be a popular opinion, but yes, I would say this is unhealthy.

Communication is a two way street. If you want to communicate your ideas into the world, you have to be willing to hear the ideas of others. In this sense, connection is power: people who disconnect themselves from people give up the ability to change those people. And the people who you can change the most are those the most unlike you.

You have to realize that people come to the beliefs they have due, at least partly, to circumstance and education. Maybe there's some degree of nature in it--maybe some people are inherently hateful. But if that is the case, I haven't met any of those people. When I talk to bigoted people at length, I often discover that they have led difficult lives, and based on their experience, blame some other group they don't understand for the difficulties they have experienced. They aren't doing this out of malice: on the contrary, they are usually doing it because they care about their own families and communities. The problem isn't that they are naturally bigoted, it's that they're afraid and ignorant, and both of those things are fixable.

By choosing to cut someone out of your life, you're choosing to treat them not as a normal person with fears and gaps in their experience, but as an inherently bad person. I don't think that is a healthy position to take.

There's no problem with wildly differing views. The problem is dehumanizing speech. Taking reddit as an example, there's a thriving r/Libertarian and r/guns together with Sanders supporting or communist subreddits.

Don't conflate strong disagreements with toxic speech.

Some get woke, others get red-pilled.

What makes you think this?

Do you think that Voat, Fox News, InfoWars, etc are somehow less effective platforms?

Those are also things we should eliminate.

What you're proposing sounds uncomfortably like totalitarianism.

No it doesn’t. I’m just totally comfortable with a world in which people are educated enough to no longer have to consume these industrial lie factories.

Who gets to decide what's true and good and what's not? You?