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Trump Says Hunter Biden Should’ve Gotten the Death Penalty for Not Paying His Taxes on Time
(www.vanityfair.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
287 points (78.9% liked)
politics
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It isn't exactly a matter of wanting or not wanting to see it. You know the addage "any news is good news?" By posting content that keeps a person and their commentary in the forefront of people's minds, that person gains an audience. That audience will contain people who can be swayed by the snake oil, but who would otherwise be reasonable. Or in short, posting their content facilitates radicalization.
That said, while content from harmful influential people needs to be approached with caution, I don't see this as promoting Trump's action/behaviors. To me it reads more like a "not the onion" headline. I'd be disappointed if anyone felt that the death penalty was warranted for late tax filing, but I suppose it's possible.
Does Lemmy have a way to filter keywords? It would be helpful for people to be able to blacklist keywords so a user could choose to avoid seeing, for example, news about Trump or content with sensitive topics.
We need that slashdot system of vote + mark "insightful", "flamebait", "funny", etc etc. add more categories as necessary so posts can be scored on multiple axes.
Sounds good to me, as long as there's a way for instances/users to disable those filters. Since they're more in-depth/granular, I suspect engagement with them would be lower, so there's a higher risk of a smaller minority using it to dictate the conversation. But I'd definitely be interested in seeing that in action. It could be really helpful for giving people tools to shape their feed.
Do you really think if a Lemmy instance or vanity fair banned anything about Trump it'd make him less influential? Maybe if there was a media wide blackout, but so long as Fox News exists and asshole oligarchs can buy all sorts of giant megaphones to push their messages, I think the rest of us only have a choice in whether we offer dissenting opinions or stay silent
I generally agree with you. I don't know that it matters so much whether articles are posted, it matters more that people continue to speak against the ideology and don't allow fascists to take the stage. Seeing others' support a cause lends it credence. Seeing that a cause exists lends some, but not as much as active support would. Seeing people voice disapproval helps to take away that credibility.
That said, the principle generally makes sense that spreading an ideology's message helps that ideology spread. The impact of posting an article on Lemmy is likely to be small, but non-zero. It's a matter of providing access to a fresh audience. Fox's viewers are thoroughly saturated with hateful rhetoric already, so there aren't many left to radicalize who can be reached by that message. Exposing a fresh audience to the content expands its reach and potentially radicalizes new people. Plus, exposure to new hateful messages can deepen the entrenchment of those who are already caught in the web.
Upvoted for a thoughtful reply, and I think your point about "providing access to a fresh audience" is a good one in theory, but I don't know if this article is really spreading the ideology's message. It's reminding us that one prominent proponent of that ideology is still out there and saying stuff, but the framing of it is pretty explicitly "hey, look how hypocritical the fascist tax cheat presidential candidate is being again".
Honestly, I'm not sure if I would've written it because anybody who would be convinced by this should already know all this stuff, but I think this author was at least trying to do the right thing here, and I don't think this is anywhere near as harmful as, for example, bending over backwards to make Trump seem like a normal politician and rephrasing his quotes so they sound less insane like I've seen a lot of outlets that desperately want to be considered politically neutral do.