> The world is a far less bad place than people credit. The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and stones, and guns, knives, or fists must

> The world is a far less bad place than people credit. The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by people, not Youtube videos. Generations have been wrongly certain that children needed legislation to keep them safe from the evils of crystal-set radios, comic books, video nasties, satanism, “dungeons & dragons”, and Kate Moss’ “heroin chic” — let alone Instagram. This guy underestimates the power of speech, and seems to get there by cherry-picking his examples. I'm generally supportive of privacy and opposed to censorship, but there are some pretty serious and legitimate problems that exist nowadays that challenge that view (some are new, some are amplified versions of perennial problems). Hand wavy dismissals of those problems don't make a compelling argument. Personally, my sense is the democratization of industrial-scale broadcasting technology might have made some bad tradeoffs, compared to the previous system where that technology was controlled by well-educated elites subject to social regulation by peers. That previous system certainly had its flaws, but it did slow many things down and tended to be more restrained (on average), and that was probably better. So you might be able to avoid the need for censorship by making wide-scale broadcasting technology as hard as it used to be (or at least harder than it is now).