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Facebook is right to boot abusers such as Farrakhan, Jones and Yiannopoulos

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

The internet empowers and accelerates the growth of countless ideas and causes, both good and bad.

We see its tragic effectiveness in linking young, resentful and mostly white men who find each other through social networks like 8chan, an anonymous message board and stewpot of racial and gender hatreds that was used by the recent mass shooters in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Poway, Calif.

The online romanticization of hate has led to such loony -- and dangerous -- developments as the targeting by white nationalist groups of bookstores and library events in multiple states, as wide-ranging as Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., and Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif., which one protester threatened with arson, according to The Washington Post.

Not coincidentally, the Washington protest -- which lasted only a few minutes as onlookers booed -- interrupted a reading by Vanderbilt psychiatrist Jonathan M. Metzl of his new book, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland."

The book argues that today's right-wing politics fuel the scapegoating of immigrants and other minorities to distract us from conservative policies that have shortchanged low-income whites in health care and other benefits.

That's a point worthy of civil debate. But protest leader Patrick Casey, identified by the Post as co-founder of the white-nationalist American Identity Movement, said through a megaphone that Metzl "would have the white working class trade their homeland for handouts."

 

That, too, is worthy of civil debate. But in a political culture where ideas turn into tribes of like-minded people in internet silos, untouched by alternative views, protesters on the left and right seem to be dangerously content with marching into other people's events, shouting or chanting a few slogans and walking out.

"Propaganda ends where dialogue begins," philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote. Social networks can't police everything that is posted on their platforms, but when they see something that poisons that dialogue, they have not only a right but an obligation to remove it.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)


(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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