In our October “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:
What can we (as a philosophical community) do about the far right discourse spilling over into platforms used by philosophers? The other day I saw a post on philpeople with the regular far right tropes, among others ranting about immigration destroying Western civilization and such. At first I thought about ignoring it, as there have been a bunch of weird posts there lately and it is not like one cannot see these kinds of things on a number of social media platforms anyway. Then it dawned on me how much the online medium has degraded if my first reaction was to keep on scrolling. I am an immigrant myself (though in a position of relative privilege – white, citizen of a EU country) and upon further thought this kind of content would make the platform particularly hostile to philosophers of immigrant background or generally belonging to the categories towards which the far right is channeling their hate. My response was to report it, but I was wondering if there is anything that can be done at the level of the community to maintain a supportive atmosphere for philosophers of diverse backgrounds under the current political climate.
Do readers have any helpful thoughts to share?
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