In one sense this is funny, in another it's justice, but I think from a broader perspective this is just more of the same tit-for-tat nonsense that moves the needle in the wrong direction.
My hypothesis is that the U.S. didn't become more divided because of moron sites like I.W. but rather because of our collective reaction to them. These groups are far easier to ignore when we stop trying to silence them.
I get the broader point of eye-for-an-eye.. but in this case how are people supposed to ignore when the harm done is very real and very cruel? These groups don’t want to operate in their own little corner of the world. They will up the ante until they gain notoriety and the attention they want, which enables them to make the money they want. The collective reaction is all but guaranteed, I would argue and it’s not because people want to silence morons, but to limit harm.
It's like fighting mold in my opinion. Happy to turn the disinfectant on a particular area if we get that chance. It's poetically done here - the parents who were hurt the most were able to capture the source of that pain and turn it towards better purposes.
I don't think the causation runs either direction. At most, I'd say that a site like InfoWars reflects the division, rather than either causing it or being caused by it.
Divisiveness in the US goes much deeper than that, and long predates both the Internet and that kind of radio program. You could perhaps pick the early 70s as a starting point, with the US deeply divided by Vietnam and Civil Rights, at exactly the same time as real government conspiracies (Watergate, COINTELPRO, MKUltra) came to light.
I'd actually trace it back further than that, through McCarthyism, the Civil War, and back before the Revolution. But there's a fairly direct course between the divisiveness of the 1960s and where we end up today.
I really don't think it would have helped anything to ignore Alex Jones.
An outcome of two-party systems is polarization. A voter in a true multi-party democracy can vote in a multidimensional way, whereas a voter in a two-party system is forced into one of two "sides" on a one-dimensional line. As the values people hold dear are threatened, they will inevitably flatten their values and be pulled towards a pole.
I don't know how to design a system to encourage such multidimensional parties. A two-party system seems like an inevitable consequence of the fact that there is exactly 1 winner in any election.
Even when a system nominally has more than two parties, there are usually two dominant parties. Other parties either align with one or the other, or are sidelined. People associated with losing parties never seem to be pleased just that their voices were heard.
It's not all or nothing, as the leader of a country doesn't rule alone. Even if a system encourages two dominant parties, the smaller parties can have a big effect. In Canada, the two big (Federal) parties are the Liberals and the Conservatives, and they always win federally.
But it's still not all-or-nothing. For example, the Liberal party often adopts NDP positions if they're gaining popular support. And when the big parties get complacent, they risk losing their "one of two" status. In 2011 in Canada, the NDP was the Official Opposition (second winning party) and the Liberals were a distant third, leading to a big shakeup in strategy. And the provincial parties are different than the Federal parties. I think our system is flawed and too "two party", but the small plurality of parties is what makes Canada a lot less prone to political extremism in my opinion.
Canaidan-Australian Youtuber Paige Saunders has a video arguing that instant runoff voting tempered more extreme politicians in Alaska:
It's my belief that it's Canadians that make Canada a lot less prone to political extremism.
But watch out: America tends to be on the forefront of things. Political extremism persists because it's politically successful. Extremists are enthusiastic, and moderates often follow them because it gets them what they want.
I hope Canadian's cultural adversion to the kind of behavior Americans display will save you for a long time to come. But the fact is that extremism works, and many people will prefer to win against their principles than lose with them.
Political extremism persists because it's politically successful in places where political moderacy isn't. Us Canadians aren't better than Americans, we have a system that allows people to vote more closely to their values and (somewhat) avoid polarization. It's not perfect and a lot of the issues come down to being a "2 Party Lite" instead of a full multi-party democracy.
In my opinion, American Exceptionalism is not a pretension that the USA is the best, but a general assumption that culture primarily drives a nation's systems and not the other way around.
If, god forbid, your child gets killed in a shooting, imagine getting harassed about it for years by misinformed assholes who say your child never existed. That is a level of cruelty that is unfathomable. Helping buy out the misinformation engine that was responsible is not even close to 'tit-for-tat' and I literally can't understand how anyone would think that. You aren't being 'wise' here by standing in the middle. You're defending some of the worst people in society.
I had a friend who often said "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Of course, he was saying that in about 2010 and I'm pretty sure it's aged extremely poorly, because the increasing publicity around conspiracy theories has only made them more popular. It feels like a stretch to say "but people were trying to silence the conspiracy theories, that's why they caught on!"
Jezebel wrote an article in 2013 about feeding the trolls until the explode [1]. I disagree today, and it seems quaint. IRL, professional trolls, the Proud Boys, come to my town (Portland) to stir up shit every few years. Do we ignore them? Or do we subscribe to "broken window theory": if they get an inch they'll take a mile? I have a tough time with this, both responses seem correct and wrong at the same time, but there's no way to tell which is working.
The traditional way was to have an eating contest with the troll, where you hide a bag under your shirt, surreptitiously slipping some of the food into that, and at some point pretend to extravagantly cut up your stomach to be able to fit more food, so the ambitious troll will try to do the same.
Nice summary and agree in the way you put it, which I am stating to all sides - so nobody likes to hear it :-) since majority is literally polarized (i.e. their objectiveness, capacity to think deep, sort/prioritize is disrupted by impact to emotions/biases)
My hypothesis is that the U.S. didn't become more divided because of moron sites like I.W. but rather because of our collective reaction to them. These groups are far easier to ignore when we stop trying to silence them.