Free speech produces rational actors. You rationalizing censorship because the book says something you don't like, or because you might become associated with

Free speech produces rational actors. You rationalizing censorship because the book says something you don't like, or because you might become associated with it, or because it might change what people think to a perspective you disagree with is the EXACT reason why freedom of speech is important. You have it. The society in which you live held it as a value. It allowed you to make the choices you've made. It is not rational to say "it's ok for me to have freedom of speech, but it is not OK for 'that author' or 'people with that idea' to have it." Free speech "works great" regardless of the degree of rationality of the general public, because it allows the rational to speak. It permits ideas to be expressed, digested, rejected. It lets people think. It allows them to further develop their thinking skills. Again, freedom of speech produces rational actors. Social media, in the form of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like are cancerous to our society. They amplify extreme positions. They do this deliberately with algorithms, or as a secondary effect of their primary goal, capturing attention. Sensationalism garners more attention than reason. It makes people care about things that are immaterial... like hashtags. Your Twitter handle is not you. Your posts are not you. Your speech is speech. That any one of those may, at some point be associated to a hashtag that only exists in these ephemeral, harmful swamps of societal outflow should matter little. You haven't lost anything real. But to say that someone should not be allowed to publish, that a book should be banned, that some person should be silenced because someone else doesn't like what they might say, that is damaging to the entirety of society. It denies the advances of the last three thousand years of political philosophy. The idea that censorship is OK is dangerous. It should be discussed, argued against, and proven, once more, wrong, with speech. The simplest reason in favor of this stance, is that it let's you be you. You'd never have even been allowed to make the choices you've made in a society that wasn't steeped in the idea of freedom of speech. Such a society wouldn't have produced estradiol, let alone made it available to anyone. Our horror at the terrible things people say is the required price for our freedom to say the important things that ought to be, that must be, said. Freedom of speech is too important to a civil society to allow anyone's discomfort to have any weight in an argument over restricting it.