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"ALL censorship is bad, free speech is good. Counter bad arguments with good arguments" has long been the consensus, but when applied it has fundamentally faile
by kyledrake 6y ago
"ALL censorship is bad, free speech is good. Counter bad arguments with good arguments" has long been the consensus, but when applied it has fundamentally failed. You don't have reasoned debates with people that have been brainwashed into cults, and who cannot tell the difference between truth and fiction. There are demonstrated dangers, recently and throughout history, of allowing certain people (particularly violent and powerful people) to have unlimited, unrestrained free speech.
Saying that Twitter should not be allowed to ban Trump is taking away Twitter's free speech rights to decide who they want to have in their community and on their private, non governmental platform. If you disagree with that, you are proposing to regulate Twitter as a public utility that will be able to censor Twitter's right to do that. But even without that, inciting riots and threatening people was never considered protected speech anyways, and that's exactly what he was doing with his account.
What's happened on Twitter instead, is that instead of banning him long ago for violating their policies multiple times over, they've in fact protected him unduly as he does things that would have gotten other people removed from the platform and probably sued or arrested a long time ago. He has in fact gotten more free speech rights than other people have.
This shouldn't surprise anyone that has studied American history. Free speech laws disproportionately empower people of means of using them, and much less people like their victims. The flavor of free speech in this country I'm told to unconditionally believe in was conceived by landholders and plantation owners. How much freedom of speech did Thomas Jefferson's slaves have? Unconditional "free speech", which thanks to Citizens United now includes money, still principally serves the Masters: the rich and powerful, the owners, far more than it will ever serve their victims. We don't do free speech or it's victims any favors by whitewashing the history of free speech, who disproportionately benefits from it, and who are the victims of it.
I'm not opposed to "free speech", but the tech crowd needs to get a lot better about understanding that there are nuances and complexities to it, and stop treating it like a religious edict that has to be worshiped unconditionally. They need to understand that applying it in a pure form can lead to outcomes that are dangerous to our safety and our society. If 2020 hasn't made this crystal clear, I really don't know what else I can do to convince people of this. I can't even eat at restaurants anymore.