> I'm highly skeptical that putting the extremes in greater contact would cause de-radicalization. I think it's more likely that would cause the extremes to further polarize and dig in for apocalyptic battle for the fate of the world.
Bubbles pop when reality collides with speculation and we get closer truth.
Honest discourse through free speech where the facts are not censored will surely get us closer to the truth.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
Those are vague slogans, and I don't think they're true (or more precisely: they rely on conditions that won't exist in the contexts where you're trying to apply them).
For instance: put a committed extreme left-liberal in front of Fox News opinion programming for 8 hour a day, and they'll be more likely to die of an aneurysm due to constant rage than to moderate.
If the distance is too great, throw-em-together online contact isn't going to do anything to bring people closer together. At large ideological distances, the only kind of contact that can bring people together is a very slow, deliberate, and personal kind (e.g. the opposite of social media). That's why my comment was about engineering smaller-distance contacts.
Bubbles pop when reality collides with speculation and we get closer truth.
Honest discourse through free speech where the facts are not censored will surely get us closer to the truth.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest