They literally aren't defending Bircherism ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner. They're talking about how pushing bad ideas out of public view rather than arguing against them can exacerbate negative polarization and draw more people into bad ideas.
You have completely missed the point of the article. So you didn't actually read the article and you're making a dumb claim based on a misunderstanding.
> ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner.
That doesn't work very well either. There are countless examples like the anti-vax nonsense.
I'll agree with the statement that deplatforming doesn't work very well. But it could work better than the alternatives in some cases.
Anti-vaxers were removed from every platform for more than 2 years during the pandemic, and that didn't work. I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety in clear terms rather than just an appeal to authority. Clearly its a hard job, but I think its worthwhile.
> I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety
Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Perhaps what you actually mean is that you don’t see this happen within the insular communities that embrace antivaccine rhetoric. You don’t see it there because such efforts are blocked. Go explain vaccines in an antivax subreddit and watch as you get downvoted into invisibility and probably banned from the sub.
> Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Yes there's plenty of that in some places, like tiktok or the NYT. I mean that people need to actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content will see it and engage with it. There was a successful example a few years back where public health officials engaged with Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn and got them to encourage everyone to get measles vaccines, but it think this is all too rare.
From what I’ve seen there is a lot of effort placed on trying to reach out and correct these misplaced views (or at least there was under the previous administration). You are saying that the issue is that outreach is not being attempted when in fact it is.
> Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn
Was this a case of actual vaccine hesitancy? Most of the antivax stuff is not mere hesitancy but hostility. If you have an audience willing to listen you can potentially sway them. An audience who refuses to listen and assumes you are an evil liar is hard to work with.
> actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content
And I explained why this is so difficult. Internet echo chambers are a huge source of this stuff and it’s extremely hard to pierce because participants actively block participants who dissent.
No I’m the Chabad case JFK’s bullshit nonprofit had been filtering and making phone calls in Yiddish to convince mothers not to vaccinate their children. However the community was receptive to arguments about the benefits after an outbreak.
So you still didn't read the article and you're changing the subject to cover for the fact that you made up that the article defends bircherism. Nice attempt at a deflection, but you're still reacting to something you didn't read based on basically just the headline.
What I'm saying is that this is a survivor effect: there are plenty of cases where deplatforming does work, it's just not 100% effective and so we have this situation like antibiotic resistance where pathologies have evolved around the defenses. It's kind of incredible that viruses have managed to evolve around vaccines to install a pro-virus person at the top of the US department of health to ensure better spread of viruses, but I guess life finds a way.
Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.
That wasn’t what you were saying but they’re good observations. This behavior of Americans was observed by Tocqueville’s observations about newspapers and the role that discussing them played in our political outcomes in allowing certain types of populist candidates to bubble up. There are analogues in English politics. The article had a continental example but it was just an analogy. That said, it’s reasonable for Americans to want to understand and adjust their strategies for quirks in their culture and political process; they can’t simply transplant Chinese government and culture here to please you, can they?
