If we stop having that debate then people will forget the lessons of history and why we fought those things. And you can't have a debate without having both sides represented.
It's toxic and shameful for fascist, racist Internet trolls to make personal attacks against people and my sense is that the main solution needs to be better tooling for helping victims block their attackers (this might conflict with the DNA of today's social platforms). But we can and should consider this stuff a teaching opportunity.
As well as an opportunity to engage the other side--the majority of people who post hateful messages online aren't latent McVeighs, they're immature, frustrated about something, and acting out.
As always the best antidote is to engage with the ones who are willing to have a rational conversation, and ignore the ones who aren't until they cool down. If someone is espousing racist ideas the best outcome is for everybody to take a chill pill, discuss their point of view and why you don't share it, and agree to disagree.
Suppression will lead to echo chambers and radicalization. Communities live or die based on their ability to sustain civil discourse between divergent opinions.
In my opinion no communications platform should suppress speech of any political persuasion, but personal attacks and hostility should be discouraged on all of them.
Remember the Ron Paul newsletters? You can draw a continuous line from the old communication network to our current one.
For me, this is the most damning sentence in the whole piece.
Before Eternal September, there were exactly as many racists and fascists in America, it's just that the mainstream media had done a fairly good job of hiding them. If you lived in San Francisco or New York, you'd have to make a real effort to see the level of racism that was still prevalent in many parts of the US. The sort of people who built the internet didn't know what they'd unleash, because they had been born and raised in a bubble.
The internet hasn't fundamentally changed human nature, it has just exposed what already existed. The average person is pretty awful and half of them are worse than that. Timothy McVeigh wasn't radicalised by the internet - he was radicalised by photocopied zines, small-press books and conversations at gun shows. The internet may have accelerated that process, but it has also brought it to light. It has shown liberals that they have been utterly complacent, that for decades they contemptuously ignored most of America, that they lived in a fantasy of their own making.
A mea culpa from the pioneers of the internet is missing the point entirely. The problem isn't that we built a communications platform and learned that a lot of people held abhorrent views, it's that for decades we ignored the rot at the heart of American democracy.