THEORY: People who support systematic deplatforming have an underdeveloped sense of object permanence.

[Lord of the Large Pants]

DISCLOSURE: I am not a developmental psychologist. This is a stupid meme theory that I just pulled out of my ass and it's likely that every single sentence is wrong. Do not take it seriously. That being said...

If you're not familiar with the concept of object permanence, it's basically the understanding that things don't cease to exist simply because you can't see them. Now if that sounds like something everyone should understand, well, yes. Most children understand it by the age of two or so (at latest, some experts think it might be much earlier). But VERY young children don't understand this. They really believe that mommy no longer exists if she goes into the next room, or even covers her face with her hands.

Well... does that sound familiar? If you ban (say) Alex Jones from Twitter and Spotify, and other sites within the public's immediate field of view, he doesn't exist anymore?

Of course, Alex Jones is still around. His followers are still around. So a more charitable reading might be that deplatforming people prevents them from spreading an allegedly harmful message. But I don't think that's true for a lot of deplatforming advocates. I really think they believe that if they can't see something in their immediate field of view, it literally doesn't exist. This is demonstrated by the semi-widely held view that if we just removed all the nasty non-leftist media, everybody would vote Democrat. If nobody can SEE the Republicans, they don't exist, and people who don't exist can't vote. In other words, this part of their brain stopped developing (or regressed to) somewhere in infancy.

Discuss.

 

[Penis Drager]

deplatforming people prevents them from spreading an allegedly harmful message

It's that one. This whole theory basically falls into the same trap I'll elaborate further on here:

the semi-widely held view that if we just removed all the nasty non-leftist media, everybody would vote Democrat

The reason they think this is that they basically don't see their opponents as "free thinking" individuals. Because of course, their way of thinking is so obviously true that anyone who's actually thinking would agree with them. So when faced with opposition, they have to conclude that some sort of pathology is the cause of the disagreement. In this case, that pathology is evil right wing propaganda.

 

[Tranimal Farm]

big thunk provoking.

I mean they act like children in many other respects so it all checks out to me. Here's your meme psychology PHD

 

[Ishtar]

Sort of. There is a belief on the left that if you got rid of Fox and right wing media, the people that watch that stuff would…develop left wing views somehow. Maybe because they wouldn’t have any other option or something.

More simply-de platforming is a political tool, and it works. The goal is to curtail the reach of your opponent’s and their message. The bigger and more legitimacy afforded the platform-the stronger the message. Cut out the platform, and there message reaches a smaller audience. It’s ability to seep into the mass discourse and shift the overall Overton Window is weakened considerably.

The Alt Right for example demonstrably slowed down and collapsed into various personality cults and e silos after it was de platformed and driven out of the mainstream.

The goal of deplatforming is thus to limit the ability of your enemies to get their message to people who might be receptive. It doesn’t matter necessarily if the people not reached don’t believe in or trust what your telling them-they aren’t exposed to your enemy’s ideas or worldview and so remain stuck in the rut you have set for them.

 

[Pee Cola]

I stopped reading when OP referred to this as a theory rather than as a hypothesis.

 

[Ishtar]

A lot of leftists seem to think that right wingers only have the views they have because Fox and Talk Radio are manipulating them. Basically right wing media is either a conscious deception or a bunch of insincere rich guys blowing hookers and cocaine by exploiting the ignorance of their audience.

They fail to realize that firstly right wing media existed as early as Father Coughlin, and two-the modern right wing “media ecosystem” was founded because well there was a market for it. Roger Ailes and the Murdoch family knew that a large section of the American(and other) publics didn’t believe in or accept what National TV or ABC was telling them. This was clear after the Nixon era, and during the Reagan years.

If the sentiments, concerns, and values of people who watch Fox didn’t exist, Fox wouldn’t exist. Leftists believe that Fox more or less generates these feelings and beliefs.

(The smarter ones know this isn’t true, but they don’t want people who they see as prejudiced and racist or whatever to actually have a media outlet that isn’t constantly attacking them and demonizing them to have another option).

 

[Dammit Mandrake!]

I think you might be on to something here. And so I bestow upon you the rank of developmental psychologist @Lord of the Large Pants. Congratulations!!

 

[Kermit Jizz]

I don't think this is an object permanence thing, but it follows a trend I've noticed. People like to fix things on a superficial level. I'm not sure why this is, but if you pay attention to a lot of mainstream "solutions" they will often be very shallow and rarely engage with the real meat of whatever issue they are trying to address.

A good example is school shootings in America. The solution often discussed is to simply ban guns. This would (at least in theory) prevent kids from shooting each other, but it completely ignores what I could consider the real issue, why the fuck do so many of our kids won't to kill each other? People would be completely satisfied to see the death toll drop to 0 and never give a care to the underlying mental issues our youth face.

I think your examples are similar. People don't want to engage with why people believe different things, they are content to simply not see it.

 

[Kane Lives]

I don't think this is an object permanence thing, but it follows a trend I've noticed. People like to fix things on a superficial level. I'm not sure why this is, but if you pay attention to a lot of mainstream "solutions" they will often be very shallow and rarely engage with the real meat of whatever issue they are trying to address.

A good example is school shootings in America. The solution often discussed is to simply ban guns. This would (at least in theory) prevent kids from shooting each other, but it completely ignores what I could consider the real issue, why the fuck do so many of our kids won't to kill each other? People would be completely satisfied to see the death toll drop to 0 and never give a care to the underlying mental issues our youth face.

I think your examples are similar. People don't want to engage with why people believe different things, they are content to simply not see it.

That's because real solutions are often messy, involves work and sacrifices, and all too often, may or may not work because problems are usually multi-faceted and may not even benefit from the solutions you proposed.

The age of Twitter activism and hashtag virtue signalling has completely destroyed any chance for a proper discourse of solutions in the public sphere.

 

[Kiwisee]

The leftists who support deplatforming also underestimate just how naturally rebellious humans are against main-speak at any given time.

If left leaning points become the only talking points all across media, that’s going to pursue people into seeking out more right wing literature. The more forbidden it becomes, the more appealing because it fits right into the natural rebellious side within all of us.

If anything, they’re slowly making the enemy talking points more desirable by behaving like authoritarians. They’d be better off letting the speds make a fool of themselves.

 

[Lurk McDurk]

Kinda like how if no one was allowed to talk about the tendency of capitalist societies toward wealth concentration, Reagan's mythical unicorn growth economy would continue forever? Which is somehow not contradictory with the basic assumption that money is valuable/desirable?

We have the above, no one in either political party's ranks (meaning elected or paid staffer) is allowed to talk about wealth distribution or the limits of property ownership. So they are, by extension, not allowed to talk about or go to Gary, Indiana for example, despite its proximity to themselves right over there in Chicago.

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

Non-binary (outside of being a total fag) doesn't mean anything, its pure performance. So why does a leftist do it? Because even their morality is a social construct, when society isn't reflecting it everywhere it doesn't exist. My experiences with LGBT family members was that most of them at some point want to fit into modern society solely out of a need to stop seeing & feeling the reality of what they've become magnified by their social surroundings—they want to be able to forget by physically distancing themselves from the reality of who they've all become surrounding them.

Alternatively when they like a thing then they desire those who reflect it back at them like asking for pronouns and other unimportant gibberish. However their complete lack of self-reflection has them stressing out over the smallest infractions in order to maintain a bubble of self-denial.

My FtM brother once wanted a fence to be painted that "God promised not to smite us anymore no matter how disgusting we get" rainbow in order to spite a neighbor, not because it would deescalate the situation (how could it?) but because it made him feel better to be causing reminders of pain/trauma/hurt for others as he himself was hurt. No mending fences for him, just vengeance for being made to feel inferior. They love only the submission and pain of others as they believe themselves to have been hurt, its their whole world indirectly once you see why they do things. But their Christian neighbor problems wasn't their teenage problems, the neighbor wasn't around our childhood home. Doesn't matter, made the person who made the bad feelings hurt too. Then they sit in the hell of their own making, completely socially cut off from non-LGBT social environments.

They are all like this—wallowing in pain and learning not to notice.

They learn to pay attention to nothing except for revenge, which is always about hiding their pain again. Because if you were someone who solves their problems rather than learns to be more helpless & bitter then you wouldn't have become such a faggot in the end, would you? Staring out at us who are so homophobic, wondering why all the gays are on one side of the divide and normal people are on the other, not seeing that they have cause and effect backwards. They're getting worse, inventing new excuses and chasing any feelings they can muster behind their denials of self.

Its less that they became gay first, and then were ostracized. Its that they were ostracized for stealing or some other red-flag, and then faked being anything which would then see the 'bullies' who wouldn't put up with their nonsense ostracized in turn. Instead they were caught up in the permissiveness of LGBT sexuality—like a carnivorous plant—and became trapped and retard levels of woke and gay in order to fit in. Which is why those spaces have such high crime and anti-social people.

 

[Screamer]

It's not that they don't think they exist, they just want to live in a curated bubble where they never see or hear anything that they don't want to.

They then act as if everyone else is in that bubble. Which is why they are so smug to people who aren't, or who think things not acceptable in the bubble.

 

[Ron Jeremy Stan Account]

Let's just call it Occam's Razor – or maybe even Hanlon's Razor here: it all boils down to good old fashioned Stalinist revisioning. The modern left (whether they be normie CNN Democrats or AntiFa commie chucklefucks) believe in and condone the former USSR in one way or another, and cancel culture is just a modern extension of the de-personing done by Stalin and Mao. Basically, when the woketards blacklist Gina Carlano for spicy tweets, it's just a petty modern equivalent of photo editors removing Stalin's enemies from his photos and convincing everyone they never existed.

Hell, not a day goes by where Twitter doesn't try to cancel Chris Pratt for the crime of being not-a-Democrat, and as a result, people in entertainment mull the idea of editing him out of Marvel movies and using CGI to replace him with other actors. When someone famous gets canceled by the left for going against the narrative, they're effectively blacklisted; and the sad truth is convicted sex offenders in the entertainment industry are still welcomed and respected (i.e. Roman Polanski).

TL;DR – The left is and always has supported Stalinist revisioning, and thus cancel culture is just that for current year.