The Marketplace of Ideas is a Conspiracy Theorist’s Wet Dream
When you platform all ideas, people get to see everything. But they tend to leave their rationality at the entrance.
Imagine a market where everything is on sale. No regulations or safety codes to prevent shops from selling you literally anything. You go there to buy ingredients for dinner as there are no other marketplaces, but you have to be super picky with what you buy.
You can buy perfectly fine lentils, carrots, and potatoes for a nice stew. Or you can end up with small pebbles, cyanide-laced carrots, and rotten potatoes. You can buy your kids a lollipop that is lemon flavored, or one with so much extra acid that it burns your child’s tongue.
All of it is available, and you have to go somewhere else to research whether a certain stand is selling safe products. And even then, you can find a stand that is otherwise safe, but sometimes douses their potatoes in bleach.
The Marketplace of Ideas
This is the Marketplace of Ideas. A fairy tale creating by fascists and conspiracy loonies to try to convince you that Creationism, Flat Earth ideologies, and pro-pedophile rings should all have a place at the table to discuss their views. In this fairy tale, the arguments fight against one another, and the ones that are true win out while the rest drop off.
But if you have seen the US in the past 20 years, or heard your aunt talk about The Great Replacement, you know that this is only true under one caviat: all humans are rational beings. But there is an issue with that…
Humans are irrational as f*ck!
We will lean towards beliefs that we believe connects to our own already held beleifs and preconceived biases.
“Platforming” Nazi rhetoric, or antivaxx nonsense only gives those harmful ideas places where they can spout their nonsense. Platforming them at all gives the impression that these views, despite being complete horsesh*t, are on par, or equal, to views that are more based on research and facts.
In this way, I always like to post this segment by comedian Dara O Briain:
“They will have this all the time with medical stuff on television. They will have a doctor on… and the doctor will be talking about something with all the benefits of research and medical evidence. And they’ll turn away from the doctor, in the name of ‘balance’, and turn to some crack witch-doctor homeopath horsesh*t peddler on the other side of the studio”
Plus my favorite quote of that clip:
“There is this idea that ‘everyone’s opinion is equally valid’, my arse! Bloke who is a professor of dentistry for 40 years does not have a debate with some id**t who removes his teeth with strong and a door!”
This idea on the news, and on social media, that they need to platform TERFs and homophobes because if they don’t, they will be seen as “biased” is the biggest issue here.
If “conservative views” mean allowing bigotry and hate-filled conspiracy nonsense on your platform, then maybe you need to be a bit “biased.”
Don’t even engage, just rebutt and move on.
There are many topics I refuse to even argue about. This is because vaccines are safe and effective, the earth was not made 6000 years ago, the earth is round, trans women are women and deserve human decency, and climate change is happening and the Earth is warming as a result of humans.
These are not things I even feel are up for debate. Along with many other things. For instance, nobody would be willing to consider rape as a justifiable act, so nobody would be willing to take such an argument seriously if it came up. So when I see people talk about how slavery was OK because one reason or another, I try not to engage, because the only response to such a claim is deplatforming.
Many people who have platforms tell me that they don’t want to seem biased so they will either not allow any political discussion at all, or will allow everyone to have a seat at the table. I was told they do this because they feel that deplatforming them will only make them more radicalized. But there is something you may not know: that’s not your problem to fix. You have 0 obligation to platform anyone.
Views that work to infringe on the happiness and well-being of others should not be allowed a platform to grow and thrive. Your mother’s post about how being gay is a sin and gays will burn in hell as a result, or your brother’s post about how “stacys” are awful and that a woman should be forced to be his girlfriend should be taken off of social media.
And thankfully, social media sites are FINALLY waking up to enforcing their own TOS after 15 years of pretending it doesn’t exist.
References:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/5/18125507/milo-yiannopoulos-debt-no-platform
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-new-data-on-trump-tweets-shows/
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/twitter-facebook-free-speech/
