Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.
Yea, a recent example of environmental shaming that worked was the reduction of littering from cars. Roadside cleanup helped, but tossing stuff out of car windows used to be significantly more common.
What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.
I believe the "Don't mess with Texas" advertising campaign was actually significantly more helpful than the ticket cost. If you think about it, people usually only know about the cost if they get fined but people know that it is frowned upon to litter through an advertising campaign.
After all, the people in and around your car can judge and shame you while you can only get a ticket if there's a cop around.
Interesting thought, it would seem to follow that those less effected by social shaming might find themselves at a evolutionary advantage over those that are greatly effected. For example those who ignore prohibitions on premarital sex may have more children overall.
Except that society has a mechanism for for enforcing social norms: laws. Premarital sex might seem like an evolutionary advantage, unless you live in a society that murders you for such activities.
You are right though, which is why high-status in a society are "allowed" to break social norms with no consequence.
Brutal enforcement is quite distinct from legislation so much so that the legislation becomes unnecessary since such practices often take the form of extrajudicial conviction and punishment at the hands of police or the military.
>Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming.
HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.
Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.
Here's a deplatforming example that is very much in line with societal consensus: when Daech was recruiting teenagers and young adults from Europe, there was a constant struggle, by both platforms and law enforcement, to systematically de-platform the accounts pushing their propaganda.
It is likely that had this propaganda been allowed to run unchecked, there would have been even more people recruited by Daech to go fight in Syria (or get married off), and to attack random civilians in the name of this ideology. Most attacks, if not all, were perpetrated by people who had in large part radicalized online, away from extremist mosques where they might have been more easily detected.
That being said, I don't believe censorship or de-platforming should ever be used outside of preventing the spread of propaganda that results in actual attacks on people. Anything short of this is just talk.
