By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.
You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.
It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.
The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.
The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.
This is valuable insight which anecdotally I agree with completely. Plenty of people got onto Parler from time-to-time and tried to throw in some reason and facts. They were silenced/ignored as quickly as those trying to throw lies/misinformation into Twitter discourse.
I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.
You said it better than me. All of the Parler-Ban-Survivors-Club posts intentionally neglect that it was their content, rhetoric and real world actions that lead to it being shown the door. And Parler was created because the people that populated it as you mentioned, were impervious to facts but would engage in endless bad faith arguments over and over again.
By allowing extremist content unhindered on your site, you are giving them a platform, you are helping them reach more people. You are in fact helping them boost their signal, rather than adhering to some ideal that ordinary people can somehow talk down extremists.
You cannot reason with a true believer. You cannot use facts to debate someone for whom the entire concept of facts is fluid and nebulous, something that only matters when they can twist it to their own ends. If you let extremists run free on your site, they will take over the narrative and infest every community they can.
It is impossible to debate someone who doesn't care about truth, lies or facts. They will spin a web of arguments that is impossible to counter, because they are not bound by what is real. The people who try to counter-argue have to stick to facts, so they get bogged down in sealioning, gish galloping, bad-faith arguments and outright trolling.
The end result is that by engaging the extremists, you allow them to repeat their arguments ad nauseum while you try to counter-argue with facts, but those take time to look up and state coherently, whereas the extremist can just make up lies as they go. It doesn't matter for them, what matters is that they appear to have all the arguments and that they appear to have the upper hand, because all that matters is projecting power.
The best way to get rid of extremists online is to ban them from your community.