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Sure. It's complicated. Heck, even just a passive laugh at a funny picture which is totally innocent and non-harmful in person, can become a crushing attack o

Sure. It's complicated. Heck, even just a passive laugh at a funny picture which is totally innocent and non-harmful in person, can become a crushing attack on a person when it goes viral and it's millions upon millions of people doing it. But just because these issues are messy doesn't give us a license paper over their complexity with reductive founding-father-esque ideology. It's pretty clear to me that in aggregate freedom of speech on the internet is not suffering—people have unprecedented access to spread whatever thoughts they happen to have. Meanwhile an increasing number of people being hurt by internet bullying, harassment, and other anti-social behavior is growing by leaps and bounds in a way that society is not yet equipped to deal with.

Karunamon 11y ago
In aggregate is not what we're talking about in this instance. "In aggregate", crime is down worldwide, people are living longer than ever. That does not mean focus gets shifted away from individual criminals and diseases. People being cut off from any medium based on, not because someone was hurt in any tangible way, but because they were offended, is a crying shame, and that goes double when the medium plays at being precisely against that sort of thing. Source on "anti-social behavior growing by leaps and bounds", and a definition would be nice, too. It seems to me words like "harassment" and "bulling" are being used as stand-ins for things as innocuous as simple incivility.