Quote:
Originally Posted by nomaddd
The fact Hitler existed before the internet, and came to power and took over nations, murdered millions of jews, all with out a web page, should be enough for you to know that taking a web page down hardly matters.
People do not accidently stumble on extremist websites, and then get hooked into the web of lies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cotton Hill
The Nazis in Germany, the real Nazis, managed to grow, organize, and take over a whole country just fine without the internet or television.
Pretty sure the KKK was at the height of its power long before modern technology as well.
Bin Laden got the Taliban all up and running long before there was ever a Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.
Almost no reasonable person accidentally stumbles across extremists sites and then becomes an extremist. People who are already extremists actively seek them out.
Pre-internet, movements like the KKK or the German Nazi party could indeed organize, but the geographical range was extremely limited. Before the invention of the telegraph, in order to communicate to someone far away, you had to write a letter and have it physically moved to wherever your recipient was. With the invention of the telegraph, the reach of communications increased. With the invention of the telephone, it increased even more, and became more widespread, so more and more citizens had a larger and larger geographical reach for communication.
Now that we have the internet, people from all over the world can visit websites all over the world, with the exception of internet censorhip, such as the great firewall of China.
The unite the right gathering in Charlottesville was a gathering not just of people in a local geographical area, it was people from all over the United States, and even some outside the US. They were able to easily communicate and effectively organize from all over the country, on a central resource they could all share, being the website.
When you take a website such as an online forum offline, the people that once easily communicated with each other would then lose their central platform for communication, and their ease and efficient of communicating and organizing is greatly diminished, or completely eliminated for some.
It's ridiculous to assert that taking down a white supremacist website, where white supremacists from all over the country communicated and organized, will not hinder their ability to organize.
If twoplustwo was taken offline tomorrow, how easily would it be for you two to communicate with the rest of us? Do you use facebook to keep in touch with friends and family? If so, if FB was taken offline, would it be harder to communicate with them?