> It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. > By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.

Not among those hard-won norms are: hate speech, incitement of violence against groups and individuals, either directly or by thinly disguised dog whistles. Those voices, though they were always present among people, were held back, suppressed if you will, by large media organizations since around the end of the second world war, and definitely since the civil rights movement, when public exclamations of hate-speech and racism became taboo. Prior to that, it was common for newspapers to regularly carry articles that we would today consider vile and bigoted. But norms changed for the better.

But the internet came along and gave a medium to hate speech that had been restrained for decades by traditional media. Bemoaning the restraint of hate speech now is lamenting the loss of a forum which has existed for only 20 years or so, from roughly when the internet became a popular medium, and was discovered by existing hate groups.

The rise of, and tacit societal acceptance of mass-distributed hate speech via the Internet was actually the erosion of the norm, rather than the other way around.