Ah a change.org petition. The PC left is out of control!

This is a great example of what bugs me about this crowd. They seemlessly move from actual problematic behavior (like a few famous examples of deplatforming at a few elite college campuses) to Twitter mobs and not entirely supportive op-ed pieces, as if it's all of a kind. Every public person gets Twitter mobbed, but they talk about mean people on Twitter as if it's more evidence that the entire American left has become deranged.

In so many cases, including in this article, they refuse to look at data and just point to anecdotes on top of anecdotes to pretend they're uniquely aggrieved.

What data are you referring to?

You could easily come up with data that might be interesting to look at when discussing this question:

- are college liberals more or less likely to answer survey questions supportive of free speech than they were in the past

- has the annual rate of incidents of college activist excesses (such as violence over unwelcome speech) been increasing over time, or has the media environment just made it seem that way?

- are liberals more or less likely to support free speech than conservatives?

and so on. All we hear about is the same few anecdotes over and over again. Don't get me wrong, if there has been backsliding on support for free speech on the left than it's something I think we should be concerned about. I'm just not convinced that the panic we're seeing is justified. Certainly not when you compare this problem to the other problems we're currently facing as a society.

edit: formatting

edit: ironic that I've found no other topic on the internet where people are more likely to downvote you without engaging in reasoned debate than on the question of whether _other people_ are willing enough to engage in reasoned debate.

> You could easily come up with data

Yes, you could. And it's been done:

The Skeptics are Wrong Part 1-3: Attitudes About Free Speech On Campus are Changing

https://heterodoxacademy.org/skeptics-are-wrong-about-campus...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-skeptics-are-wrong-part-2/

https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-skeptics-are-wrong-part-3-i...

You're welcome! :-)

Thanks, I'll look at this, though I would advise retaining some skepticism when evaluating data from a single source, especially when that data is confirmatory of that source's stated mission. Here's some more to evaluate:

http://jmrphy.net/blog/2018/02/16/who-is-afraid-of-free-spee...

You might want to consider that the stated mission was a product of the data, particularly in the case of the heterodox academy.

Not everything is a partisan slugfest.

What are you saying hacker? Are you saying there's no deplatforming and it's a totally made up concern?

Twitter mobs on their own are indeed mostly harmless. Employers and other organizations that can have an actual impact on the target of the mob and who are complicit with it to avoid the possibility of making the life of PR people more difficult by having to defend the distinction between corporation and the personal opinions of low level employees are not.

Of course both sides are guilty of that and they basically crib from each other's playbook in the spirit of "having them taste their own medicine". In the end it it is never what one would call civilized discourse, no matter who is doing it and who you disagree with.