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Just gonna put this here so everyone has a basis to go from: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exerc
by ElijahLynn 7y ago
Just gonna put this here so everyone has a basis to go from:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
- koboll 7y agoThe 1st Amendment was developed in a time when there was no such conceivable thing as an anonymous forum of people that encouraged each other to kill crowds of civilians at random with machine guns, leading to such killings actually being carried out, repeatedly. The idea that "the answer to bad speech is more speech" breaks down in such a situation. There is no amount of "more speech" that can fix what's wrong with 8chan, because there's no way for mass condemnation to have any effect on it. It only serves to feed the trolls. And when the trolls are fed, the killings become more likely. If you've got a better solution than deplatforming, I'd like to hear it. I'm certainly a free speech advocate in the abstract. But it's increasingly difficult to ignore that anonymous online communities are threatening to undercut the basic premises on which free speech as an ideal stands.