The idea that bad people having a voice on social media causes other people to become bad people (often the argument as to why we must defederate from bad servers) is equivalent to:

Thinking violent video games cause people to become violent.

Thinking explicit song lyrics cause people to become criminals

Allowing people to be openly homosexual will cause others to become homosexual

Banning books

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@freemo

"Bad people" can be a very subjective term nowadays,
If you mean criminals, criminal apologists or rallying for criminal acts that should be heavily banned.

A-holes/trolls, two categories: the casual ones and the professional ones (troll farm, spam, ddros, etc.), depending on the moderation there should be some tolerance for the former and limiting/banning the latter.

Finally, most people have a predisposition to certain ideas and information(bad ones included), finding communities online to share and expend on those is only natural. Being exposed to new ideas and information to challenge our belief is also very important, that's why I am against defederation and banning certain topics, because that leads to echo chambers and radicalization.

Although being exposed to highly additive dopamine media and targeted engagement algorithms can be extremely harmful, that's sadly the case for most mainstream social media.

@voidabyss There are plenty of good reasons you might want to ban someone. The issue here is not that im against banning for any reason. the issue is the argument claiming that being able to see bad people will make you a bad person. You can ban a person or server just for being annoying, wasting time, flooding posts, etc.

@freemo
> the issue is the argument claiming that being able to see bad people will make you a bad person

That would depend on the level of interaction and exposure, most people are highly influenced/conformed by the community that they interact with IRL or online and the media that they consume.

I am pretty sure that there were a lot of good people in Germany during the NAZI regime, but their influence, propaganda and censorship turned many good people bad.

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