Free speech is an interesting animal. On one hand, the definition and scope of free speech is an interesting philosophical topic with many nuances, viewpoints,

Free speech is an interesting animal. On one hand, the definition and scope of free speech is an interesting philosophical topic with many nuances, viewpoints, arguments and counter-arguments. On the other hand, unlike many philosophical topics, free speech's implementation has very real impacts on our world. Get it wrong and the results could be disastrous. I've heard everything from 'all speech should be protected' to the full 'only decent speech about allowed topics should be protected', and everywhere in between. How do we apply free speech in a pragmatic way to approximate a good balance point between safety and freedom? I don't have an answer. I do have an analogy I use, camp fires. If I am in the forest I can have a campfire, but only if I follow certain rules. Unrestricted, my campfire could burn down the entire forest. Here are those rules, with their social network analogs. * I can't use accelerant, only natural fuels. In the same vein, no sock puppets, no Twitter bots, and no one that uses them. * I have to make a safe isolated space - I can have my campfire in a fire ring with brush cleared around it. Similarly, if I am going to have provocative speech I need to do it in set aside areas for it, and not share the speech outside of those areas - especially if sharing allows parts of the speech to be quoted out of context. * I should not try to hide the fire I am building, because then it can't be policed. In the social web this means that hiding speech behind a barrier allows that speech to be more vitriolic, whether that barrier is anonymity or a private whitelisted chat. * I shouldn't make the fire too big. In the same vein, a controversial thread that goes on forever has it's own context, and the negativity in it will be remembered by later posters more than the positivity (this is how our brains are wired). Also, I shouldn't try to make my conversation viral. * My fire should be the size I need, and nothing more. This analog is a stretch, but I take this as social web conversations should not embellish the truth. I have a duty to tell the truth when making statements that fire people up, perhaps to the point of violence. It is hard to enforce these net-wide without a digital reputation system, which I would like to see (not China's, that is something else). But shunning is a great tool, even without a reputation system. Should Trump et al be socially 'shunned' by all social networks? If you are left of center you may say yes, right of center you may say no. So I leave that up to others. My personal yardstick is whether a person's comments engendered real physical harm to others through the actions they inspired, or real mental anguish through the insults they slung. If you use that yardstick too, then I think the answer is clear.