As I write my reply, this comment is currently grayed-out from downvotes. I find this absurd. Anyone who has read Mill knows Mill was a utilitarian. He didn't support freedom of speech for dogmatic reasons but for practical ones. Mill didn't really care about the rights of the speaker to speak or write. He cared about the right of others to hear and read. From chapter 2 of On Liberty[1]:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Mill's point is this: Every time you silence someone, you are preventing others from hearing what that person has to say. Maybe those people want to listen so they can entertain an idea and become convinced. Maybe they want to listen so they can better understand and refute the speaker. Maybe they just find the rantings of a crazy person amusing. Whatever their reasons, the "cure" of censorship is worse than the "disease" caused by letting people communicate. (Note that this formulation also makes it easy to distinguish speech from "speech" such as air horns designed to disrupt a speaker from spreading their ideas to those who want to listen.)

Moreover, censorship requires designating a censor. Is there any person or group who you would grant the power of deciding what you're allowed to read or hear? I certainly can't think of one. I'm an adult and I can decide for myself what is acceptable for me to consume, thank you very much.

Of course YouTube is not a government and they shouldn't be forced to host things that they don't want to host, but following the free speech norm is almost certainly more beneficial to society. Every once in a while, one of those crazy ideas that must be censored— one of those ideas turns out to be true. Just like slavery and the subjugation of women in the past, there are moral errors we are committing that future societies will condemn us for. Censorship prevents those ideas from coming to light sooner and impedes moral progress.

Warning messages before viewing something? Sure. Add links to rebuttals? Fine. Demonetize? OK. But deletion? I'd prefer you didn't.

1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

I think it's funny how people will downvote arguments favoring free speech. At least they're being consistent.

What's Mill's position on filter bubbles?

The very idea of a "filter bubble" is definitionally impossible given a Millian open market of ideas. IMO, it's an ideal worth striving for. Maybe it's easy to draw the line with crazy racists or flat-Earthers, but what about complex social issues: abortion, euthanasia, religions values?

What's wrong with YouTube and Facebook exercising a bit of "benevolent despotism"?

The classic problem - who decides what behavior is benevolent?

"$INSERT_POSITIVE_ADJECTIVE despotism" is still despotism.

So it comes down to each person's belief set - do they believe that despotism is unfortunate when misapplied but is a force for good in the right hands? Or do they instead believe that all forms of control inevitably will get seized by corrupt forces? Or more radically, that the entire concept of control is inherently contradictory when seen in the broader context of us having brains with limited computational power, limited knowledge, forever bounded by time in a locally deterministic universe, and thus any attempt to seize control just furthers the propagation of ignorance that the "benevolent despotists" are ironically trying to eradicate?

The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.

Ah yes, and, if I remember my Mill, we must be the barbarians?

Or we can look at modern evidence, not centuries old political philosophy.

I'd be careful with dismissing the giants whose shoulders we straddle. If it weren't for the Magna Carta, the French and American Revolutions, and the Declaration of Independence, most of us would still be living under despotic rule.

The manga carts basically gave power to landlords, the American revolution protected slavery, the Declaration of Independence explicitly stated the slaves were not people.

No one should be beholden to the “giants whose shoulders we straddle”. Note that that phrase is actually applied to scientists who developed evidence based theories rather than old “pure thought” silliness.

As far as despotic rule - England had an elected government at the time of the American revolution (not saying that America wasn’t justified), but it’s also worth noting that a large number of the early English colonists left England because they wanted to enforce religious domination that wasn’t legal in England.

> the Declaration of Independence explicitly stated the slaves were not people.

That is categorically not true. It said some problematic things about Native Americans for sure, but they could never have gotten away with pro-slavery language in the Declaration. It's a propaganda document that had to unite wide swaths of revolutionary ideologies; abolitionists included.

I assume that you are actually thinking of the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution, which is still more complicated than just "saying slaves aren't people." Counting slaves as people was the slave-owner position, because being counted wasn't about rights or freedom, it was about State power. It was the abolitionist arguing that slaves shouldn't count as people, not to de-humanize them, but to keep the slave-owners from being able to have it both ways.

You're right, it's an implicit assumption in the declaration, made explicit in the Constitution.

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Rests on the assumption that slaves are not "men". But something else.

The DoI did not release slaves, which is fairly explicit statement that slaves are people. Of course Deciding that slaves were 3/5th of a person, and slavery was legal is an explicit statement the “all men are created equal” was not something believed by the signatories of the DoI.

That said the “State power” argument in this case has always been the justification for the treason committed by the confederacy. When faced with a legally elected president, making a legal change that they didn’t like, the confederate states mutinied.

They have retroactively tried to call it the “war of northern aggression” (hint, you committed treason, so it’s not). Then they’ve claimed it was about states rights - if it was, then the Supreme Court would have ruled it unconstitutional, they’ve also never mutinied over anything else.

>The DoI did not release slaves, which is fairly explicit statement that slaves are people. Of course Deciding that slaves were 3/5th of a person, and slavery was legal is an explicit statement the “all men are created equal” was not something believed by the signatories of the DoI.

You're treating two different documents that were written 14 years apart by two diffent, though strongly overlapping, groups of people as if they were statements someone made back to back. Did Thomas Jefferson believe the words "All Men" included the slaves he owned when he penned those words? Fuck no! But he still wrote the words in a way that men who did believe that "All Men" meant ALL men could get behind it. Compare this to how he describes the Natives.

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

By examining the nuance, you can start to see a fuller shape of the society. Slavery was a hot button issue that was left unspoken until the moment it unquestionably has to be addressed. The Native Americans are considered savage and warlike, and that is an uncontroversial view.

I understand the impulse to fight back against whitewashed history, but throwing out all nuance isn't helpful no matter what cause it is in service to.