Debating dickheads doesn’t ‘expose them’, it empowers them

If you ask those who take part in debate content, it’s just the modern version of important discourse to find solutions to the world’s problems. If you ask those who make the content, it’s easy viral content. If you ask those who watch it, it’s just WWE style entertainment.

All those people are partially right, while they all also turn a blind eye to the direct damage they are doing by indulging in this.

For this article, it’s important to understand the ‘Overton Window’, which is basically the range of views most people think are acceptable. The idea that society decides what is acceptable and from within that scope is where we will find the ‘solutions’.

Debates are one of the ways that the ‘Overton Window’ can shift. Whether it be climate change reform, immigration or even the first topic of The Feed’s recent debate video – which was 6 men ‘debating’ the ‘acceptable’ amount of people for men to sleep with compared to women; debates tell the audience that every stance involved is at least somewhat valid while those involved end by agreeing to disagree.

Debate as entertainment, turns real issues into thought experiments, sometimes with people who aren’t very good at thinking. Over years it slowly decayed discourse while claiming to be doing the opposite.

Just look at the now cancelled Q&A. A show that started as a program for respectful debate on policy which corrupted to the point where a producer once bragged to me that an episode where Alan Jones just said racist shit at Stan Grant for an hour was great because it successfully led to a bunch of tweets from people disgusted by the racism.

Debate as a form of content is designed to entertain and enrage, the two main ways to boost social media engagement. This leads to experts getting pushed out because experts are boring and think that debate should be nuanced and fact based. Fucking losers.

Instead they get ‘controversial figures’. Whether it be influencers, reality stars, journalists, commentators, politicians, failed wannabe politicians, athletes, activists, bigots, or people funded by lobby groups to make rage bait content – all of them are chosen and all are presented as having equally important things to say. Some acting in good faith, some doing it for clout.

It’s how we end up with viral clips of Mehdi Hasan on Jubilee forced into debating racists and a literal fascist on immigration and ethnic cleansing.

Debate content isn’t about ‘finding solutions’ – usually complex issues get less time to ‘be debated’ than it takes my people-pleasing friend group to decide where to get lunch.

Dickheads take advantage of this because they know there isn’t enough time to get in the weeds of why they are wrong, or to analyse everything they say, leaving their ‘opponents’ to have to let some bullshit fly so they can get their point out. Exposing the audiences to bullshit.

Often the questions are about setting up ‘opposing views’, which leads to the platforming of climate change denial, white supremacy, and basically every other thing that used to be a ‘fringe opinion’. This happens because the ‘opposing view’ on experts being right, or that something exists, is that experts are wrong, or it doesn’t exist.

Which leads to the SBS getting informed people like Tarang Chawla going face-to-face with a reality star on a topic that is frankly, not men’s business.

The idea that six men were asked to ‘debate’ things like whether the amount of sex people have matters and gender roles is fucking disgusting but is on par for this type of content. There is no good reason for it to exist, it is sexist, but they don’t care because it’s just content to them.

In a world where real people are being hurt and killed by these types of ideologues, they decide to go ‘ooh lets have bigots and former reality stars tell us why women shouldn’t get to choose what they do with their body while men can do what they want’. 

On a side note, it’s really sad that after cancelling The Feed as a TV show, SBS has decided to take the branding behind the formerly award-winning youth show that gave us the likes of Jan Fran and Marc Fennell, take a massive shit on the corpse, and turn it into a knock-off Jubilee online content farm boosting bigots.

One point in the debate that was good was when Chawla spoke powerfully about gendered violence referencing personal experience regarding the murder of his sister Nikita. Some have pointed to it as a sign of the debate being ‘worth it’, but even on that topic it wasn’t him talking to a panel of experts, so they still veered into unproductive ‘not all men’ shit. 

Snippets of good don’t undo the damage the rest of the content causes; we can have the good without the bad. Especially when you factor in that some people will only see the ‘body count’ snippet in their feeds.

The argument for boosting dickheads is that it exposes them for who they are and that debate viewers are exposed to smarter voices. But that being the goal just doesn’t work in practice.

During The Feed debate, one of the freaks flat out said he’s a hypocrite. During the Jubilee debate, one of the freaks flat out said he’s a fascist. Mission accomplished, well done.

But the question is, what does that actually achieve? The guy who called himself a fascist got applause for saying it, sure he lost his job, but now he is making a lot of money thanks to donations from people who became fans of him from that debate.

‘Exposing him’ in this way only made that dickhead stronger. It only spread his views further, normalises them and emboldens those who agree with him.

As it did with debate fiends before him like Ben Shapiro, who would convince people that he ‘won’ by only debating unprepared people and talking fast saying ‘let’s say’ repeatedly, and Andrew Tate, who grew his platform in part due to constant debates where he would always lose and sometimes even rage quit live.

Win or lose, the dickheads always spread their network a bit more, yet progressives keep thinking that if we just go to their playground, challenge them to their game, maybe the next person to expose the fraud as a fraud will be the one to finally convince everyone.

Go on Charlie Brown, one day you will kick that footy.

Ultimately, if debating dickheads worked, we wouldn’t be in a situation where dickheads are making the world a worse place. 

We can stand around and go ‘yes, our guy got that fascist to look silly, hell yeah dude we won that battle’, but while that battle is being held, the fascists are dismantling the world around us.