Free speech doesn't apply here. This website is private, the owner doesn't have to give a platform to neonazis or trolls, and irrespective of the politics of it all that would be a bad idea as his business is associated with this forum.
“ Free speech doesn't apply here.” From a purely legal standpoint, this is entirely true.
“ This website is private, the owner doesn't have to give a platform to neonazis or trolls...” Again, completely true. He doesn’t “have to.”
But, let’s look at it from an overall societal standpoint. Let’s assume that you wanted to “make the world a better place” in today’s parlance. And let’s look at a hypothetical as a thought experiment.
Let’s say there is a photo forum, and the members of said forum, as luck would have it, are all Neo-Nazis. Sometimes they talk about digital sensors, or filmstocks, but occasionally, being people of the Neo-Nazi persuasion, the discussion veers towards Neo-Nazi beliefs. It happens.
Now, let’s say you are a photographer who likes participating in photo forums, and, additionally, you are a “good” person, meaning, for the sake of this hypothetical, someone who is not only
not a Neo-Nazi, but someone who has arrived at that set of beliefs through a lifetime of study and logical reasoning. One day, one of the Neo-Nazis makes a broad statement affirming several aspects of the Neo-Nazi belief system, and other Neo-Nazis on the forum chime in with a variety of illogical and historically inaccurate statements. You then take the opportunity to lay out a well reasoned and unemotional rebuttal of everything just posted, item by item. Most of the points you make are things that many of these Neo-Nazis have never heard before, and the logic and factual accuracy of your post is hard or impossible to counter.
Now, let’s say that as a result of your post you are banned, and this post and all your other posts are deleted, never to be seen again, by anyone.
People who might have benefited from your wisdom, now never will, because the discussion is prevented. So, they, all of them, will go on being Neo-Nazis. Opportunities, on both sides, for growth, are lost. This is the ultimate nature of deplatforming. No matter who does it.
If the meaning is not yet clear enough, let’s flip it using the latest example here. Using “Bart Bart“ as an example in this hypothetical, let’s agree that most or all of us find his beliefs to be either morally wrong or historically inaccurate, things which usually seem to go together. Because of that, moderators ban him, deplatform him here. Had that not been done there would have always existed the possibility (yes, always existed) that a logical, well reasoned, unemotional, historically factual post, or series of posts, from “good” people here might have changed his mind about things he showed up here believing to be true. That’s what “arguments” (as posited in rules of logic) really are, a back and forth which can lead people to the truth if carried on long enough.
You ban him, out of a sense of, there’s no other word for it, self-righteousness, and you throw away that opportunity to make him a better person/bring him closer to the truth/cause him to agree with you.
Life’s a long journey, you should never give up on people. He may be a complete jerk today, but you just failed him, so what does that make you?
I don’t know Frank Petronio, (and I am assuming from other posts that is who Bart Bart was) from Adam, and I would not agree with the things that it is said here that he said, but I took a look at his website subsequent to this dustup. He’s an excellent photographer, and he’s obviously quite intelligent. Intelligent people can, and often do, believe stupid things. People can change, people can be changed, but never by people who ostracize them. Those people have thrown away the opportunity to “make the world a better place.” There is no way to justify that.
It’s not impossible that his non-photographic views could have been “improved” over time, more time, and we’d still have a good photographer here to perhaps teach the rest of us some things about photography, which he obviously understands well. In the meantime, adults are able to skip over the parts they find offensive, and learn from the good parts, if the good parts are encouraged.
Broader societal picture:
If instead of trying to educate, through unemotional, informed dialogue, we just deplatform, banish people we find to be beyond the pale, what actually happens then, in the real world?
Let’s use “Neo-Nazis” as an example, to the extent they exist. Bart Bart is still out there, but we are not talking to him; he didn’t cease to exist, but now he doesn’t have “friends” here, the very people, the only people, who might have eventually brought him around, he’s over at 4Chan or Qanon, with people who are
all exactly like him, where he will not only never hear an opposing Viewpoint backed up by facts, his current views will be amplified and given emotional support day in and day out, forever. So, he’s unlikely ever to get “better”, and more likely to get even worse. That’s on us and any other “reasonable” group who ostracized him.
If so intolerant of other people’s way of thinking that we cannot bear to hear it, just use the ignore button until maturing a bit more. Once you reach a level of maturity where you can hear odious things without being “triggered” then engage the other, with facts, and unemotionally. And if you cannot out reason them, maybe the answer is to study more yourself, until you can, not shunning them just because you can’t.
Letting people we don’t like stay at the party isn’t about “giving someone a platform to use for propaganda”. It’s about leaving open the possibility for positive change for that person, which only happens through continued dialogue.
Hating “hate” isn't better than hate. It is hate. And it will eat you up, no matter how holy and enlightened you think you are. Bringing people in, or at least trying to, is always better than pushing them out.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
Unless you let them.
