Free speech is a fascinating debate to me. When I was younger, I was a free speech absolutist. I believed in rationality and that if you couldn't defend/oppos

Free speech is a fascinating debate to me. When I was younger, I was a free speech absolutist. I believed in rationality and that if you couldn't defend/oppose ideas then your position had no strength. Censorship was a sign of weakness. Even clearly "good" censorship (say, banning child porn) has problematic boundaries. Now...I'm far less confident. I still believe in rationality, but I also see clear weaknesses in human's ability to process. Rationality emerges over time, not in the moment. Speech isn't just ideas, it's emotion. It creates social pressure, fears, threats. And humans are social creatures. Even this forum is chock-ful of signaling patterns and inclusion. These aren't personal failures, but human facts - to be without these would be to dissolve the functions that make us form communities - to remove the items that make us NOT be "defectors" (to signal). We have to trust others, or we'll spend all our time verifying all the information we get and never accomplish anything. But this introduces the ability for others to exploit this. Speech has never been inherently good nor bad, and thus "free speech" is also neither inherently good nor bad. It is just a force multiplier for whatever you try to do. And "good" speech can't be solely dedicated to battling "bad" speech if it wants to achieve any change, while bad speech achieves its goals just by existing, or even by demanding the attention of those giving "good" speech. An inherent imbalance. In the big picture, this all shakes out over time. The good speech investigates and explores ideas. Bad speech is beaten. Speech in the middle helps ensure that the "good" speech really is good, and periodic bouts of bad speech help the system enforce the boundaries that move everything in a healthy-for-society direction. But to zoom out to that level is to ignore all the suffering such a system entails. "You can't have a society that is afraid of hurting feelings!" free speech advocates will cry out...correctly. Some amount of suffering is unavoidable. Pick any arbitrary line between restricted speech and unrestricted speech and it's easy to see that people will suffer as a result. But that does not mean that we should automatically accept that unrestricted speech is the answer. That we should be blind to all the suffering that IS happening because we fear the suffering that MIGHT happen. Or perhaps unrestricted speech IS the answer...but a lot more of us need to be calling out for the societal responsibilities. Free speech is a powerful tool, and like any tool should be used wisely. If we aren't calling people out for using it poorly, but are calling out people for any attempt to restrict it, we're empowering only one side of the equation. But that gets into a circular argument, because if you replace government restrictions with social ones, you have the same result - restricted speech. I don't know where I stand on this. The only thing I see clearly is that the number of people that seem to be seriously examining the issue is vanishingly small relative to the population.