With regards to “platform shopping” - I think this idea perfectly fits into the Insurrection Discussion.
Ultimately, Qanon and the various participants in the Jan 6 Insurrection did just that - they kept “shopping” until they finally found sites that would cater to their worst natures. On the big name platforms it’s not possible to encourage people to encourage illegal activity. So when people are banned for outright illegal activity, they go platform shopping and in this instance some of them became one of the 200 + people arrested on federal charges, and were completely convinced they were in the right.
So then the question is: Is it good business practice to try and keep these people? I would argue, no.
The next question is: Do the platforms have some kind of moral obligation to “rescue” these people from themselves and keep them in the fold, so to speak? Again, I’d say no.
I’m open to other possible views on why platforms would want to keep people on it’s platform when it is bad for business and they have no obligation to do so.
Now, of course, the people who are banned from twitter or facebook or wherever - from THEIR perspective are God’s gift to internet discourse and they think it’s a loss to the community when they leave. Going back in my memory all the way to the mid 1990’s - I can’t really think of any case where a forum or platform banned a person and later regretted it.
Quite the contrary - when establishing a platform part of the business process is deciding what common “types” of people you want to attract. Users are often off in estimating their value to the business, because they usually don’t understand all the various monetization strategies that do not include them.
We can drill this concept all the way down to Integral Life.
Some users might THINK the admins should pursue this action or that action - because they of course think that the way they see things is obviously correct. If only the admin would see it.
It’s a very similar psychological strategy to people who believed they were Patriots and had to storm the capitol to rescue Democracy from Hillary Clinton’s Cabal and think everyone against them is “stupid” or brainwashed by the liberal media or whatever. If only people were so not so “stupid” and could just recognize the “truth”.
The difference is in degree - the people participating in Dec 6 are at 1,000,000 and the people on this forum who might be dissatisfied with admin practices and go looking for something they agree with for the most part are probably at .001.
The basic problem with “platform shopping” to me seems to be one of seeking confirmation until one finds a community that confirms and reinforces one’s biases, which I would venture is often a person’s darkest shadows. If a person does that for 30 years and goes deeper and deeper into confirming their darkest shadows we get QAnon and various White Supremacist groups.
To me the most healthy solution is to not accommodate either overt or veiled demands in various forms to run the platform as certain individuals believe is “right”, but to run it according to how the founders (or whatever their title is) decided to run it based on their organizing concept and desired audience.
I’m not Buddhist, but I do try to live by the Mantra “If you see Buddha on the road, kill him.” For myself, this is obviously not a call to violence (because it’s the Buddha, lol) but instead a call to question ourselves when we are absolutely convinced we are “right” about a certain topic - and a thousand times more so when we think we are “righteous”.
@isabel
Have no worry. Hunty, Wittmer kidnapping, Insurrection and Russiagate will be properly investigated in early 2023.