> Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shi

> Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship. Every time a neo-Nazi gets shut down, people trot out the "First they came for the communists…" — and yet the next time, it's a neo-Nazi again, every time. It would be bad if people who aren't promoting harm start getting shut down, but I don't see any evidence that current events will lead to that. > (1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off. We're not talking about the creation of a new power here. This is a power that already exists, and bad actors' ability to use it isn't based on whether or not it's used for good. > What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice? Again, there is no causal line between "Neo-Nazis get deplatformed" and "Corporations deplatform their critics." You can have either one without the other. In general, your fears seem to be based on an assumption that looks something like "Bad people won't do anything to good people that good people don't do to them." But history has repeatedly shown that this is not the case. Our refusal to take the threat of Nazism seriously the first time didn't in any way constrain the things they did to people.