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Notes -
I think they do exist and have a measurable influence, but that influence is about as small as possible while not being non-existent. I would agree that alien abduction believers are more influential.
https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Richard Spencer does have 70k followers on Twitter, and while he does seem smart enough to avoid putting any blatant "Blacks are dumb beasts and Jews want to control us" on his actual Twitter, his podcast is a bit less veiled and does get at believing blacks are worse than whites.
My opinion is that people panicking about Nazis being on the verge of taking over are fools. But that it is a good policy to do stuff like ban open Nazis from social media platforms, because spreading that rhetoric isn't good.
This may be the stated reason, but the real reason is simply that most people do not want to have to scroll past swastikas on their way to NBA updates, radio station contest announcements, cat pictures, memes, and personal life updates, and consider this significantly worse than advertisements.
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I don't think Richard Spencer is very significant. Yes, he has 70k-ish followers. But I don't think that alone means much - some may be fake, some may be hate-reading, or just wondering what he's going to say next. If you flip through his most recent dozen or so tweets, engagement is pretty low - replies and retweets mostly in the single digits and likes in the low double digits.
I agree that panicking about them taking over anything is foolish. I disagree that banning them is good policy. Fundamentally, actual Nazism is stupid and annoying. Why ban them unless you think their arguments are extremely persuasive? They're not. Banning them just gives them a persecution complex and makes people think they are cool and dangerous - their ideas must be really great, or they wouldn't bother silencing them! Wanna rebel from the system? Wave a Nazi flag, it's what the system really hates! Instead, give them all the rope they need to show everyone exactly how stupid and annoying they are. That's what we do here, and it works. We have some posters writing Nazi-adjacent ideas. You can read the threads, it's pretty clear that they aren't convincing anyone that their ideas are good. The only thing I would ban or block somehow is aggressive abuse of random users.
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