Little by little the western freedoms are being taken away. And you want it to go faster?
Rap music which idolizes violence is allowed, despite thousands dying every year in connection to crimimal enterprise. The case to ban rap is just as naive as the case against free speech.
Same is free speech: when actually exercising this right was about printing books of pamphlets that meant a certain level of financial and intellectual barrier to it, free speech was clearly all benefits and no risks. Now that literally anyone can invent his own conspiracy theory and post it on facebook - and with well, intellectual majority driving the views and rankings of them so smart content ends up unnoticed coz it's so nerdy - people are right to be concerned.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but this is also a very dangerous approach in my opinion. What you seem to be saying is: "as long as only the well-off - and therefore likely to be educated - people had the means of mass expression, dangerous ideas could not proliferate". Should it be one group of people, preferably "us", who decides what the other groups are allowed to think and discuss? To me this is much more ripe for abuse than the other extreme. Doubly so because the dangers in free speech can be much better solved with education and removing the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots.
So I disagree vehemently that the solution is to limit free speech. That to me is akin to cutting off our own noses because we have a flu. The root of the problem is elsewhere.
What does pretty much every malicious and totalitarian regime start with?
1. Ban free speech 2. Institute the concept of thought crimes 3. Limit education
Concentrating knowledge and intelligence in the hands of a few, and reducing information and idea flow to the masses.
Dangerous and radical ideas can proliferate mostly among marginalized groups who have been excluded from welfare for one reason or another. People who are gripped by existential fears and see little to no possibility of improvement or solution to their problems will naturally gravitate towards radical opinions because they have nothing to lose, no other options and nobody else listens to them. Banning their voice will do nothing just push them further away and radicalize them even more.
And then again, it is mass democracy, which was always a mistake, and if it didn't exist many of the problems we have now won't exist either, it's entirely fair if voting is limited to landowners who have land giving no less than $X annual rent, the way it was in late 1700s-early 1800s America. And even more so when we have massive social programs so democracy becomes a death trap of freeloaders voting for even more free stuff.
What is the realistic exit from it? I believe that Chinese way relies too much on individual obedience so culturally impossible in any Western country. Returning to democracy for the elites and human rights for the (sub)elites too, is impossible because it's a catch-22: people won't vote for it.
Maybe something like Putinism is a good way out: keep democracy on paper but make sure actual voting is irrelevant, keep free speech on paper but make sure "right" content is ranked better than "wrong" (this is how Russian social media, which is KGB-owned, works, after VK.com acquisition). Of course it can't also work without some countries remaining true democracies - just kept afloat, with their social programs, with massive amounts of stolen money - because the elites need safe places to live in, after all.
This way, we will return to the "good old" American system of 200 years ago - except geographically, rather than racially, segregated.
When the 2nd amendment was written there were privately owned battleships
People always had the right and capacity to make conspiracy theories. They deeply believed myths, and could just as easily be manipulated. Look at the Salem witch trials. Look at the conspiracies that sprung up from the moon landing or the assassination of JFK.
Most serious media outlets care about the truth of the content they share. Facebook simply does not.
Generally, when people talk about "assault weapons" they're actually thinking of automatic, military-style weapons with large magazines. Those are "assault rifles", which have been legislated at the federal level for a long time. The laws are indeed complicated, but in general these weapons are hard to get legally.
Here's an decent explainer: https://www.ajc.com/news/national/assault-weapon-assault-rif...
The threshold to be considered a dealer is fairly low. If it's someone with a table, they're going to be a dealer. It's just that if an individual sells their personal firearm, they're not required to do a background check, and at gun shows you'll see a few people walking around with a rifle slung over their shoulder and a sign saying they're selling it.
But that's semi-auto only (one bullet per trigger pull). Fully automatic weapons have stringent federal requirements.
There is a ban on the import and manufacture of new ones (for civilian use) in place since 1986, so the ones available for purchase (by anyone, again, no "special federal permit" required) cost about 10-20x more than they would cost otherwise, which effectively restricts them to "rich people only".
They're freely available, though.
Florida, in particular, has banned machine guns like the AK-47 which is to say weapons that fire multiple bullets with one pull of the trigger.
Semi-autos are the dominant technology in firearms; when a bullet is fired, the energy released forces a fresh bullet into the chamber, ready to fire but you must pull the trigger again. This is known as "semi-automatic" and is legal everywhere, for now.
It's a federal felony, however, good for the better part of a decade in jail.
This is a false statement. Only manufacture of automatic weapons for civilians is banned in the US.
Many automatic weapons are manufactured in the US for police/military/law enforcement.
I know people claim "hunting" with these rifles, but I think there's a shiny toy thing at play more than utility.
And every gun I’ve seen with a detachable magazine comes in a variety of sizes. Hell. A Ruger 22 rifle accepts a 100 round magazine. Is that an assault rifle?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapon
The AR 15s come in various configurations and are quite modular from what I gather.
Collapsible stocks and vertical front handles etc. Clearly originally made for use cases that differ from hunting animals.
They look cool though!
Fully automatic allows multiple shots with one pull of the trigger.
The anti-gun lobby has conflated the terms to push a blanket ban on anything that looks remotely military. But functionally, it's two separate categories and fully automatic weapons require a federal permit that takes about a year.
> Yes, assault weapons are a different category, legally and technically, from semi-automatic weapons
What's the clear legal definition of an assault weapon?
E.g. as referenced elsewhere in the comments here, the federal assault weapons ban clearly talked about "semi-automatic assault weapons", suggesting the legal definition was not so clearly "only full-automatics"?
https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/oct/02/difference-be...
Whereas past laws that used the term clearly considered it not to be fully-automatic only. E.g. the law that's commonly known as the "Federal Assault Weapons Ban" (1994-2008) literally regulated "semiautomatic assault weapons", a category which doesn't make any sense if you insist that assault weapons always are fully-automatic. So what's changed that you now can insist that including semi-automatics doesn't make sense? I won't claim I know all relevant legislation, but it seems pretty obvious that not that long ago, it wasn't as clear-cut as you present it.
Certain military-grade rifles that are semi-auto but can also be made to fire fully auto are classified as assault weapons, officially and militarily speaking.
Civilian anti-gun activists just call anything "assault" that even looks kind of military, like a black AR-15 that might only fire .22 bullets, one at a time. By the way a .22 bullet might not stop a man unless it's a heart hit; this is why police (and bad guys) tend to use .45 or other larger caliber weapons. A .22 is quieter, less kick, cheaper ammo, and is good for killing rabbits.
This is precisely the problem that people have with the term "assault weapon".
If you are using the words "assault weapon" you are basically saying that you want to ban guns that look scary, because this is what the original assault weapons ban did.
But after a bit of googling I guess I found the missing context: "Assault weapons" being full-auto amounts to a US gun scene shibboleth to make it easy to dismiss anyone making the mistake of using the term without having to engage the substance, even if many people, including law makers, define the term differently.
"People call all kinds of things assault weapons based on stupid criteria, what specifically do you mean" would have been a far stronger point than this "haha, semi-automatics are normal guns and not assault weapons" game.
Specifically, the assault weapons ban has nothing to do with banning semi-auto weapons. It has to do with banning things like bayonets on weapons.
Thats the point. The only definition of assault weapon, that has ever existed in the law, has been regarding banning mostly cosmetic features of a gun.
> without having to engage the substance
The substance of the assault weapons ban, is regarding mostly cosmetic features. It is instead other people, who are trying to ignore talking about the actual substance and specifics.
The thing that really pushed me over the edge was the poll that said “98% of people don’t believe what they read on the internet”.[1]. Unlike many people, I actually have faith that people will accept the truth, eventually. It may take time and it may be messy and ugly, but it will happen.
And I also believe that the free flow of ideas (good and bad) is a fundamental quality of the American system that is overall a net plus, not a net negative.
And I feel sad when I see people so willing to give up such a fundamental right because of what they see on Facebook. I mean it’s not like there are thousands of examples of where a lack of free speech has been used to oppress people.
[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/23/almost-everyone-doesnt-...
It is ironic that you use the word "faith", which is a word that means "steadfast belief in spite of lack of evidence, or indeed countervailing evidence".
What would it take to convince you of the truth that people do NOT always accept the truth "eventually"? Anything? Or is your faith unshakeable?
You don't need to restrict speech to kill millions, you just need to have a louder voice than the people you are oppressing, deafening out anyone who might otherwise listen to them.
On the free speech and authoritarian side of things you have stuff like the genocide in Myanmar where the direct correlation does appear to be causal: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
What's the amount of murders and ethnic cleansing attributable to free speech where free speech does become suspect? Hundreds, thousands... what?
Basically authoritarian regimes restrict speech to maintain control but don’t necessarily commit genocide and some authoritarian regimes will use free speech to commit genocide.
Facebook has an algorithm which highlights outrageous and livid claims. These often tend to be false.
Your Facebook feed is curated to look like this—something a “traditional” publisher can’t do because of libel laws, etc.
What needs to happen? To my eye this is simple—all algorithmic publishing should be held to the same standard as a newspaper or even better—abolished altogether. Let’s keep it chronological.
You are essentially arguing for a social internet without filtering and search engines. Lots of people claim to want this, but the fact that no platform lets you do this leads me to believe that the revealed preferences of people are different.
You can choose to see it as a revealed preference or you can call it unhinged addiction.
I am in the “unhinged addiction” camp.
We create and shape markets by defining the rules. As an example the supposedly free NYSE will stop trading if a stock is going down a certain percentage points in a day.
I can tell you that getting off social networks was a hell of a lot easier than getting off nicotine (i still haven't succeeded with the latter, to be honest).
Like, the hyperbole associated with social networks just astounds me. They are just websites. They have been carefully engineered to be addictive, like many other services, but there's nobody at Facebook coming round to people's houses and forcing them to open the app.
I actually think that social media is addictive because people like talking to other people, and these tools facilitate this.
Is HN addictive? Is it more like heroin than the NYT?
Maybe these hate bubbles wouldn't proliferate if they had to co-exist on a platform with a diverse set of opinions. These people are heavily outnumbered. But of course, all the major platforms are so successful because they aggressively silo people into pigeonholes via curation.
And then people who believe in free speech but don't intend to use it to be assholes don't feel comfortable there, further making those sites hives of ... well, whatever bad adjective you want to assign.
scum and villainy.
And we should not put up with that kind of dishonesty.
Objectionable views HAVE to be opposed, or they will fester and grow. Polite disagreement doesn't help, because the person will just go on to post them again, and again, and again. The fact that I politely disagreed with one of them will not help with the other 99 times.
There needs to be visible consequences for breaking norms, or the norms themselves will break.
I agree, there must be a way to have the better beliefs to survive and the lesser beliefs die, but ostracizing people who hold the lesser ones doesn't rid them of the beliefs.
Free Speech is not a supply problem it is a demand problem.
It’s not a question of free speech vs censorship, it’s which type censorship do you prefer? The corporate kind or the shitposting bullying trolling kind?
At least in my personal view.
Take this forum here for example: There is a community driven mechanism that enforces some rules. Your comment can end up dead. One can decide to view dead comments, but given enough negative feedback you can be silenced here.
The community enforces values. These might change over time, but they are there, because the community does value collective freedom (freedom from trolls and such things) in a form that allows individual freedom of speech to be restricted.
On a deeper level: There are always different forms of freedom at play and valuing one above the other restricts the other necessarily.
Freedom of speech without restriction enables said actors and bot farms together with content personalisation to hinder the freedom of individuals. Because they aren't allowed to see content that amplified voices drown out or that is being hidden from their view by the algorithms.
So actually Google, Facebook and the likes are already restricting the freedom of people. And doing so under the thin guise of "fighting for freedom of speech".
But it doesn’t really matter whether you consider it the goodies or baddies, it’s still a form of shutting down speech.
The deplorables are made more visible and made to appear more popular by bot-assisted upvoting/retweeting/sharing efforts.
Non-deplorables are silenced or made to self-censor by mass-downvotes/death threats in DMs/doxxing. And even the ones who just view and don't write get disheartened and leave if their curated frontpage is a cesspool of falsehoods and outrage bait. So yes, bot farms and their manual brethren (wumao dang, IRA, alt-right discords) over time help to purge dissenting voices.
The interesting argument isn't really about the mechanism of free speech anymore, it's the scale. Anyone can have a global platform without any real effort these days. Most of the famous internet people would never have been a blip 20 or 30 years ago. There is something to say about the need for some sort of gatekeeping, but theres also more arguments that counter the benefits. The problem with Facebook, Twitter and the rest of their ilk is the fact they benefit from radicalism of some sort. Take a step away from politics. Who are the popular folks on social media for any subject? The people who are really into whatever it is. They're fanatical about their craft or topic. They then try to show how great it is as to have others appreciate it, do it themselves or fund that influencer's endeavors. Radicalizing the audience. When it comes to ant farms, drone racing, game dev, game plays, growing hot peppers, the dangers only go so far in radicalizing an audience. Apply the same thing to politics and you get psychopaths. Why? I'm not smart enough right now to answer that, but I recognize that social media requires it. That's how they get the views, the ad sales and that sweet sweet user data. They won't give it up, no matter what rhetoric they pull out of their ass and throw in our face. The worst part, they'll agree to censorship, but to their own flavor. Current free speech generally requires you dont talk about hurting or killing someone or directly lie about something specific (libel, slander). Current media platforms, both traditional and social, believe those rules only apply when their group is the victim. When it's those "others", it's okay to be a complete dick and break the law. This goes for all political parties, they're all equally assholes. Free speech laws are meant to affect everyone evenly (naive, I know) when it comes to the gov intervening. Sadly, it's technically true that private corps dont have to play by the same rules. But when the corporation can influence the gov, where is that line drawn? On top, corps influencing gov, where is that line drawn too? This whole thing is a mess. We should go back to being hunter gatherers and fight bears for blueberries.
It's been a year since the Halle attack, the attacker is a joke: a typical internet incel as you would picture him. Infantile, insecure, physically weak, clumsy with his firearms. It would be literally funny if not for the two people he killed. Sorry for them, but, should we really sacrifice basic freedoms and rights, being afraid of THIS GUY?
Every state and institution in the world 'censors.
The BBC, ABC news, Fox News, the government, every corporation, Facebook, Twitter, Google.
Every single one.
Stop talking about this absolutist stuff - it's not helping the argument.
You, as an individual, can stand outside your home and say quite a lot of things before the cops will arrest you, but that doesn't mean there are not rules in the commons.
There are basic rules for civility in every institution, if you don't like them, start your own institution where you can press 'free speech' essentially to the legal maximum.
If someone tried to stop you from criticizing a politician, that would be an unnaceptable restriction but that's not happening.
If someone tried to stop you from telling your friends privately that you think COVID is fabricated by the Nazis, well, it' be bad because you have that right.
But don't have any inherent right to go on to some massive platform to tell Americans that you have evidence the COVID vaccine is killing people - if the owners of said platform don't want to let you on.
This point works against you, and actually supports the free speech advocates.
If you don't like facebook, and want to have a more censored platform, then leave and go make your own social media company.
But this whole thread is not about that. People do not want facebook to be allowed to support as much free speech as it is currently doing.
Why can't these pro censorship people just take their own advice? If they don't like free speech then feel free to make your own social media company.
My argument was the opposite - that if people want less censorship, because they don't agree with FB banning their version of 'hate speech' - then they can make their own website.
There are 0 common platforms that don't censor. They all do, all day long.
Do you realize how much content on there is not suitable for publication? Death threats, doxxing, harassment, using the n-word to refer to black people etc.
No civil platform is going to allow that - and most of them have a higher bar frankly.
The much more challenging question has to do with 'truthiness' - because if you make a post that says 'XYZ stole the election, here is the 'evidence' (and it's not evidence) and it gets 300 million views - the result being that 50% of a nation firmly believe the election was 'stolen' but by objective measures it clearly was not ... then you have a mass media problem.
The 'free speechers' might want to be inclined to allow that to pass, because there's nothing illegal about lying. But misinformation has material impact.
Issues of vaccination are a deep - we know that 'anti vaxxers' have had huge success on Social Media leading up to COVID, and now were are facing a public health emergency where we need probably 75% of the population to get the vaccine to reach 60% herd immunity or whatever - or the pandemic won't subside.
People spreading false fears and lies about vaccines - while probably totally within the scope of 'free speech' is going to create some very serious problems.
On the other side, Twitter has announced that 'deadnaming' a trans person will get you banned. Literally saying the name 'Ellen Page' (because it's now 'Elliot Page') is like hate speech. While I understand that 'deadnaming' is a very rude thing to do, I don't remotely think it's a form of 'hate speech'. The government of Quebec fined someone $30 000 for making a joke about a guy in a wheelchair. Again, really, really not nice, but should not be illegal, and probably should be allowed on Facebook or Twitter as well. That's why we have the 'unfollow' button.
If someone is threatening/doxxing/abusing Elliot Page a person in the wheelchair, probably greater steps need to be taken, but not otherwise.
All media is controlled. Always. Someone is always in charge, someone is controlling what information flows, and frankly it's usually biased, but most 'institutions' bend at least to the public good.
So you can say anything you want on your front lawn, and on your personal blog ... but once in the commons, different kinds of filtering will kick in.
But specifically this thread and whole article is about people wanting more censorship, on FB. Those people are the ones who can leave, and go make their own website. Everyone else, who supports free speech can stay on facebook.
Facebook has enabled significantly more free speech, and democratization of information. That is why people are upset in this thread, and this article. They are upset about how much free speech facebook has enabled.
> The 'free speechers' might want to be inclined to allow that to pass
The free speechers have already won. This is what people in this thread and article are complaining about. They are upset about how social media has allowed a lot more free speech, and has democratized speech and information to very large degrees.
If you don't like how much free speech is on the internet right now, then you are the one who is going to have to create your own website. Because the pro-censorship people are the ones who lost, and are currently very upset about the fact that they lost.
Thats the entire point of this article thread.... That people are upset about how much more free speech is available right now, and how much easier it is for people to spread ideas.
Those are the people who should leave and make their own platform that has less free speech, if they are upset.
And yet we already censor beyond that regarding health and voting issues that is certainly NOT the line that is drawn in the sand legally. This is a fact and a very bad development.
It props up all kinds of things good and bad and Social Media execs have fallen into a pattern where they take credit for the good (using the good to defend the Like Counter) and pretend that the bad has nothing to do with the Like Counter.
Old social norms go out the window because everyone is busy pointing at the Like counts they have accumulated to justify their actions and behavior.
So we are at a stalemate on every debate.
Social media companies will talk about everything under the sun other than what happens to society built on top of a like counter.
The way I understood it, the shooter placed a manifesto there before shooting, that, if anything, could have given the enforcement a way to stop it if they were fast enough — it enhanced their chances of doing so.
8chan allowing anything and everything hardly caused the shooting, and gave enforcement a possible window to stop it.
I don't know if this is not well known in tech circles perhaps but this is basically an established fact among those who study this kind of thing for a living. Those communities effectively act as an extremely effective radicalization pipeline where the most extreme version is actual acts of terror and mass shootings.
In the exact same way that say law enforcement and intelligence agencies spent the last 15 years trying to ensure that access to jihadi material wasn't freely available online they are now being asked the question of what exactly is the difference because not only are the outcomes very similar but so are many of the steps leading up to it.
Because tech circles actually visit 8chan and come to the conclusion that the news reports are ludicrous — have you actually visited it? Because I was a frequent visitor on 8chan before it was pulled and the news articles were certainly grossly inaccurate that portrayed it as Stormfront.
In reality, most of the website was about lolcat image macros, cartoons, and dating advice.
> In the exact same way that say law enforcement and intelligence agencies spent the last 15 years trying to ensure that access to jihadi material wasn't freely available online they are now being asked the question of what exactly is the difference because not only are the outcomes very similar but so are many of the steps leading up to it.
Yes, a prime example of how censorship is never done æqually.
Mein Kampf should be illegal; the Qur'ān should be banned; but the Bible, which contains much of the same rhetoric is untouchable, of course, even though it pretty much contains “Hear ye, go out and smite ye to death the male who lieth with another male!”.
But when another Christian killing of a M.S.M. occurs, there are no cries to ban the Bible; there are no cries to shut down the churches that led to this radicalization or the websites where they might gather.
Censorship has never been a practice of fairness.
A slight exaggeration.
It looks like Florida man was saying “I feel threatened!” to have a plausible use of lethal force to protect himself against the elderly woman.
I don't think it's that much different though, it's still about screaming/shouting whatever you want to get your way (either to assert dominance or to laugh).
Imagine Facebook with no comments, everyone just has exactly the one status they can update (and somehow their are no fake accounts).
But that's not what any of these platforms are, so really it's speech for whoever has the fastest script.
In the same way that people with money find it easier to make more money, people with social influence can leverage that to obtain more social influence. It's a positive feedback loop. The "multiplier" is never 1.
With automated bots, fake accounts etc the attempt is to create this illusion.
4chan has free speech and no one takes it seriously because it becomes obvious who you're talking to.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “RACIST! NAZI!” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: why is this controversial and the post I'm replying to not? We both advocate the exact same thing: to abolish a founding principle of western civilization because sometimes people die. Hell, there's even a quite large disparity between the number of deaths caused by those two principles - my argument has way more merit.
I'd really love to see why these two cases are totally different and incomparable. Three paragraphs of mental gymnastics or less though, please!
Laicity means that religion is kept away from the State, it has no impact whatsoever on private practice and definitely nothing to do with it being 'banned'
They think it's some sort state-enforced communist atheism or some anti-religious-freedom agenda, without understanding the pains the country went through in the past 300 years (sometimes to the brink of civil war) to remove religion from the State and ensure religious freedom and equality for all.
For most, religion is a personal matter. It starts becoming an issue when it is used as a political ideology that aims to destabilise the State.
It happened before with Catholicism and there are now some fringe Islamist movements that want the same.
I have no "twisted broad exaggeration and misunderstanding" of belief. I don't think this chain of comments has a good tone, and won't reply further.
That is not true; you're free to have religious symbols in public places. What you cannot do is wear them ostensibly if you're acting as an official for a public service. Teacher ? no cross/kippa/etc. while you're teaching. Cop ? same. Mayor in the process of marrying a couple ? same again.
Parent helping teachers during a school outing ? you're perfectly allowed to have such signs visible, you're not an official representative of the French republic. Same goes in public places in general.
There is also a perfectly rational thinking behind a reciprocity of rights: if you can see me but I can't see you then we're not equal.
There are also fierce debates around the role of women, ensuring equal opportunities in society, and the fact that ideology (whether religious or not) should not remove citizens from their rights and duties.
Of course, any of this is always open for debatable, and it is debated, at length, politically, socially, philosophically and these issues are always in flux, between those who want more restrictions in the name of greater freedom for all, and those who want less in the name of greater freedom for all.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/22/islamic-veils-...
He called the burqa "a problem". And he said that somehow it's not a religious symbol (of course it is ...).
>And he said that somehow it's not a religious symbol. The full sentence: "It's not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement."
Basically, "some think it's a religious sign, but we don't agree". And most Muslims in France don't either as the wearing of burqas and niqabs was quite uncommon in the first place (some estimates placed the number of women wearing them at around 2000).
We can argue on the merit of forbidding full-covering or whether there was really a need for all that noise but there is a reasoning and much public debate on the matter.
From your original comment, you seem to disagree, but in France people are free to practice any religion they wish, as long as it is done within the boundaries of the country's values and laws. So your statement of "Religion is already banned in places such as France" -without further characterisation- is clearly inflamatory and false.
[1]: Deepl makes a decent translation of this: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/dossierlegislatif/JORFDOLE000...
If there were a law that banned cross shaped objects, and then someone said "well, we aren't banning a religious symbol! All things in a cross shape are banned" this would obviously be a dishonest argument.
We don't have to play games here, or be dishonest about what the purpose of the ban was.
> was triggered by the rise of radical islam
Ok, so then you agree that it was literally created to target certain religion practices... That is what people are saying. That is a target law, meant to attack a certain religious group, specifically that of "fundamentalist islam".
That is what everyone is saying.
Most Muslims do not believe in the requirement for burqas and niqabs. There is no such prescription in the Qur'an itself, only a requirement for modesty that some fundamentalists interpret as full concealment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_c...
No. France is ultra-secular, and does not ask religion when doing their census.
However, most Western countries want Saudi Arabia to stop sending radical imams, including France and the USA.
I do not see free speech absolutism, I see a hidden agenda. Facebook is a platform used as a hate spreading megaphone. That is the reality that is being defended, free speech is, sadly, a red herring for many people. Let defend whistleblowers, let defend the free press, and stop pretending that Facebook represent freedom of speech values, because it does not. Defending absolute freedom of speech but then telling a platform what it should say it's at best native at worst willingly damaging.
Facebook already has tons of policies for civil conduct that will get you the boot.
Every platform does.
This was never a case of free speech absolution - I think those doing that are straw manning it a little bit because they want to stop the ability for people to have controversial opinions.
'The Challenge' probably boils down to how to deal with otherwise nominal speech, that at scale, can have problems.
For example, total fabrications about COVID vaccines.
Having the opinion: "I think the vaccine is harmful" - is not so bad - hey, it's just an opinion.
But when you make a vide with all sorts of lies in it, and it causes 200M people to believe the vaccine is an instrument of government control and that it has nothing to do with COVID etc. ... well then it becomes a public health issue.
That's a problem.
When foreign actors use to misinform to change the outcomes of elections, obviously that's a problem.
We already have rules regarding what we consider to be acceptable both in general society and in a legal context with regards to free speech so the line in the sand already exists.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “censorship” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: There are some interesting points in the replies that I think could be answered with some clarifications.
I think there is something that is very unique about social media specifically that should have a higher standard about it than other forms of speech. My argument is not at all about trying to force "the one acceptable point of view" or anything like that. History has a long long list of ideas that were once considered dangerous that not only stood the test of time but instead became something much more and in order to continue having that diversity of opinion is generally a good thing.
There are fundamental problems with how the economics of a social media platform function. Never before has a tool existed that allowed everyone to broadcast any unfiltered thought they had to everyone else in the world with basically zero effort.
Furthermore, they can do this both anonymously and without any kind of repercussion. That sounds great in theory as some libertarian fantasy where you might expect the "marketplace of ideas" to take care of everything and the cream would rise to the top. The reality of what that looks like in 2020 however is actually very different and I think now would be a great time to have that discussion about what guardrails we can all generally agree on that would address some of the many downsides that have come out of this experiment so far.
All of the current iterations of major social networks came pretty much exclusively from a group of people who had zero background in anything then Computer Science. At no point have we reached out to groups like sociologists, ethicists, historians, psychologists or anyone else who might have some really valuable thoughts on how to arrange anonymous social interactions in a way that might not devolve into the shit fight we have on our hands currently.
As an example Facebook was started by a guy who by all accounts is not exactly known for having great social skills where he could rate women on campus. Twitter is a platform that purposely doesn't allow for nuance. I think they were both a terrible starting point and that perhaps we should rethink what social media COULD look like from the ground up and learning from all of the mistakes we made with it the first time around.