RE: You can't stop fascism by becoming fascist and you can't beat hate with a ban hammer
And think of Steemit, if you post on Steemit and people like your speech then it's more profitable. If you post on Steemit racist hateful speech then for sure it will get flagged into oblivion. If social media were more like Steemit then there would be economic incentives for people to care about producing quality speech because they would be rewarded (encouraged) to do so. People who would produce hate speech would be punished (discouraged) from doing so.
On Facebook and other social media, because it is almost entirely demonitized or the rewards are indirect, there isn't a feedback loop. People on social media posting hate speech don't have any economic or financial skin in the game. In fact, it might even be the cast that these are astroturf campaigns where because people can't get paid to post on Facebook by the platform itself, that a lot of posters get paid undercover by furtive methods to post the hate content and generate the hate memes.
Once again, when people post positive memes they get nothing from Facebook or most social media platforms as a reward. People posting hateful memes on the other hand don't get rewarded from the platform itself but might get rewarded by various communities which want to promote hate and for that reason it's hard to even know if there are economic benefits which outweigh the risks for the hate content generator.
Don't get me wrong. I really love steemit and the concept of rewarding good and positive content but actually I don't like the general idea of steering behavior with rewards and punishments. This means that there is still an external motivation for the behavior which is often bad. But to change another persons intrinsic motivation is unfortunately near to impossible. Giving a fascist the opportunity to earn money by promoting equality and respect for the different... won't make him a better person. He would rather refuse the reward than doing something that doesn't correlate with his mindset. Which is also true for the other side of course.
The only way to steer behavior is with reinforcement of desired behavior. You can avoid punishment but you still have to encourage the desirable behavior with rewards of some kind or why do you expect it to happen?
You can't change people. You can encourage behaviors.
There is no best person. There is a better world though and the way to have a better world is to encourage people to act better. It does not matter if people change internally or if fascists are acting nice because it's profitable. Adam Smith and capitalism itself is built on the fact that the butcher or baker doesn't have to care about you personally to do the service. If you started trying to focus on getting people to enjoy serving you then you'll quickly find that it's not ever going to be the case that everyone is going to like you or like serving you.
But at least if they get their just rewards then at least they are encouraged to do quality service. So I don't think it's important to care what others believe. I think it's important to focus on how others act and how they treat us more than what they believe or what goes on in their head.
They don't have to promote equality or respect for the different. They simply have to not discourage, interfere with, or spread memes which hurt other people. They don't have to believe in equality to determine it's more wise economically to not dedicate themselves and a lot of time creating anti-equality or anti-diversity content. Of course there are true believers in the world who will not care about their own future or how much money they lose but these people are irrational.
Maybe education and appreciation are the best ways to "steer" behavior. Because most bad behavior has it's roots in bad education and bad self esteem.
But my point was just that I like it more when people find their way to enlightenment instead of chasing a carrot in front of their nose. If people don't understand why certain behavior is bad or good they might always return to that bad behavior once the incentives change.
Education is the use of reinforcement mechanisms like reward to promote learning of desirable behavior. In school you get good and bad grades, rewarded and punished.
But education does not equal school. Especially in school this system of reward and punishment does not work very well. 80 % of what you learn in school will be gone a few month later because in school most of the time you don't learn because you're interested in something but because you're forced to. Real education is nothing you will experience in an average school. Schools don't educate, they recruit. IMHO
Even outside of school, reinforcement is the core behind all behavioral changes. Education is a result of that reinforcement.
If you are talking the "real world" it's all about reward and punishment. A lot of people in life want to get the most rewards for the least punishment.
The problem about Steemit model is that rewards are based on Steem Power, which is essentially money.
According to the conspiration theory of the New World Order, world richest families controls public opinion by owning the mass media. If that were the case, they could take over the platform by infiltrating a few users with big amounts of Steem Power. I really do not believe in that conspiration, but that shows the vulnerability of current Steemit system.
So build another platform.