Honestly, I'd be happy to see all political groups - left or right - expunged from Facebook. Politics and social media clearly do not mix, as this year has demonstrated all too brutally well.
The problem is when people are able to be blocked/filtered out, so then all rational/reasonable voices are lost from the conversations. If these irrational people had to filter through rational/reasoned long-form and short responses, I'd be curious to know what the outcome would be.
>One unintended consequence of crushing speech on the right is that sane righties lose the ability to talk lunatics out of crazy. Back in the old days, I had many conversations talking sense into conspiracists from Rothschild to contrails. They listened to me because I’m credible in a way CNN is not. Now, instead, I shut up. I fear we’re about to embark on an unfortunate experiment to rediscover why, precisely, free speech has for 300 years been considered a bedrock necessity for a civilized society.
It’s entirely this. It’s not just “now I shut up” though, it’s ”I had no idea there was a group planning on doing xyz, because they were mad about abc, never heard anything about that in my Facebook timeline!”
The reasonable voices are either not participating because they have been “nudged” not to, or they are afraid of the consequences of being open and honest about their ideas. Let’s not pretend the upvote/downvote systems aren’t SPECIFICALLY for this.