We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).
In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.
Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating.
Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.
It is not murder. There's a concept called "Negligent homicide," but even that is relatively well defined and requires intent to cause harm.
Don't want to get into the rabbit hole, and I am not in agreement with all the laws the US has, but the point is that "bad speech" is way harder to define than murder/homicide. Not only is it harder, it is arguably impossible to attain a good consensus on what it is.
PS: I don't agree with the premise that we should regulate speech, but if you were to want to do it it would most likely backfire or be counterproductive because of these reasons
Does encouraging people not to wear a mask (or just not wearing a mask) in the face of clear evidence and recommendations to the contrary count as intent to cause harm? That is, if I know doing something will cause harm but do it anyway am I engaging in negligent homicide?
Popularity doesn't imply correctness or legitimacy.
As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become."
Douglas Adams, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Each and every day things are getting better. Do not fear.
It's like the people who describe how utopian things would be without government, but for some reason don't want to move to Somalia.
I'm sure there's some unmoderated site filled with Nazi's high fiving each other you could be posting these thoughts on censorship. I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.
Moderation of a public space after consensus has been reached long it's members is fine, moderation before dissenting opinions have had their opportunity to be voiced, discussed and their merits disproved through consensus is not. The former is democratic, the latter dystopian.
There were definitely problems with all of that, but it was hardly dystopian.
But I think it's a slippery slope to go from seeing that dystopia where some opinions are off-limits to imagining that having any opinions at all be off-limits in polite company makes a dystopia. There's long been norms against stuff like libel, holocaust denial, disregard for human life, etc. Those as norms hardly seem dystopian.
I think the main problem is that the lies people believe today (i.e. that the election was stolen) are constructed on a deep foundation (which, like anything, is some part factual and some part counterfactual).
To refute a lie, you have to not only tear down the lie, but the foundation on which it was constructed. And because life is complicated, sometimes we construct many verifiable truths on top of complete lies. We have to be careful deconstructing these.
So, to correct a superficial lie (election was stolen), you have to deconstruct the lie recursively (state electors, mail in voting, behavior of senators/congresspeople). This is incredibly hard, because people trust the platforms on which the lie is constructed.
This is why we don't bother trying to reason with the "lizard conspiracy" people. It's also why PhD students can't be bothered to explain their work to people outside their field.
It's a real conundrum.
And yeah - some of it is so far out there it's not even wrong.
The fact of the matter is that its true that bad arguments _should_ be fought with better arguments; that's a necessary assumption at the base of any philosophic discourse, and doesn't magically disappear when some section of people are disagreeing with you.
It's ironic that you call the OP naive, as your line of thinking leads directly to censorship, and history can attest to where that leads.
You argue like Trump been censored for 150 years, when he really wanted to censor those who actually been censored for over 150 years.
How can you then justify that these people have the right to exercise real power and vote?
> hopelessly naive Yet, it’s the only way to protect their democratic rights and lead them back to a better path.
We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes that there is an authority that we can all trust to be objective and not a vested interested that either ignores or skews evidence and narratives one way or the other out of self-interest. Who should be the ones determining what is "true"?
I'd like to hear some examples.
What they aren’t is entitled to force a private company to host and promote their content.
And by "forcefully", I meant between the walls of the specific media site. (Though good luck explaining the difference to an angry mob.)
Everyone reads Trump's nonsense. There's an exponential dropoff in the count of people who read replies.
But that still doesn't make it a fallacious argument.
Sometimes doing the right thing is ineffective. And the aftermath of that crossroads has generally been a place that has not gone well in history.
Freedom of speech exists to protect the rights of minorities: the opinions of the majority are tautologically safe to speak. It's unpopular opinions which need protection, and nothing is more unpopular than an inconvenient truth.
This is a hypothesis in want of evidence.
So no, they are not empowered to do this, and they don't have much power (comparatively) to be shielding from free speech in the first place.
Probably, but as long as the government isn't putting undue constraints on, the market solves this problem. Parler is right there if a person doesn't like Facebook.
Within 3 years of starting serious censorship in most major platforms we have had a near coup.
Sounds like the new system is less effective then blood letting and the only thing that it has going for it is that it makes the people supporting censorship feel better about them selves.
Trump wasn't President in the '00s and early '10s either. We didn't have a President advocating sedition to maintain his power. We didn't have a President soft on white supremacy as an acceptable political position.
If anything, I'd call the causation reversed---people using social media to organize violence has the companies in charge questioning their own culpability in violent outcomes.
And it doesn't not imply it.
And did you not pay any attention in the 00s? Bush was a white supremacists and made racism federal policy in airports.
Like the current VP who did as much as she could to ruin the lives of as many blacks as humanly possible?
Trump doesn't know how not to say the quiet part loud.
Also, there's another dimension which I think gets immediately thrown on the floor when these discussions come up. Very rarely are people calling for controls on what can be said at any time. Instead, it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people. Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.
I find something deeply satisfying about the idea of someone generalizing 333-million people in one comment, using the word "fetishizing" to describe their view of a principle which has generally been regarded as essential to the vast majority of advances in human rights anywhere progress has been made, and while commenting thusly has done so all in the service of making the central point that it is they who overly-value free speech.
> Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.
So public speech should be further limited, provided La Résistance is still permitted to speak freely as we enter an era with an ever-increasing number of state-aligned location-aware microphones in homes, workplaces, vehicles, pockets and (on) wrists?
What could possibly go wrong in that scenario?
That’s a tiring argument and describing that as a very American way of fetishising free speech is entirely appropriate.
Free speech is hard. And there are many difficult questions around it where you have to actually engage with the content of something.
So I get why people want to take shortcuts, but that is just so tiring. This unwillingness to even engage with content is extremely tiring.
People are responsible for their own actions. "But he incited me to violence!" is not an excuse for violence. Maybe in the case of a superior giving a subordinate a direct order (in which case both are responsible), but "the man on Twitter told me to do it" should hold about as much sway as Son of Sam's "the neighbor's dog told me to do it".
Even if someone is saying something supportive to you, you would probably prefer they don't scream it in your face.
Posting a statement to a Twitter account that people are free to follow, ignore, or block at their will is not even remotely comparable to physically forcing yourself into their presence to yell at them.
Now, how we determine demeaning language and what the punishment/cost is for using it is a worthwhile discussion. We _already_ have a system for when someone’s _character_ is attacked publicly: libel/slander.
1. Requires actual damages. The speech cost you money or demonstrably harmed you in some way. No, "you hurt my feelings" or "I paid with my identity" doesn't count.
2. Both parties have an opportunity to plead their case to a neutral adjudicator. The proceedings are generally public record and there is a process for appeals. The rules governing the system (laws) are public record and citizens have a say in electing the representatives who write those rules.
3. The speech must be not only demonstrably false, but intended to be believed and also be something that reasonable person could possibly believe. Opinions generally do not meet the level of libel or slander.
Yeah, that's not bad. Compare that to Twitter's system where an opaque set of rules are applied inconsistently by an unaccountable party with no appeal process.
If you can think back to a time when you have been verbally abused, use that as a model. For some folks, this happens routinely on Twitter and real life (usually for minorities in a group). Nobody said Twitter’s framework is the correct system, but suggesting that demeaning someone is “free speech” has me scratching my head.
I can’t say certain things and that’s totally fine. Disliking someone doesn’t mean that demeaning them is necessary. It’s already not legal in the workplace in the US when it is prolonged or severe.[0]
The alternative already exists today and is being applied unevenly globally.[1] I brought up examples of free speech exceptions already. I believe demeaning someone should also be an exception, and yes today that isn’t an exception in the US. Perhaps we need very precise definitions for these concepts to avoid over application, but hate “words” and the like are easy first passes.
Harassment is not illegal in the criminal sense. It is a cause you can sue people for. That also means it requires evidence and convincing a judge and possibly a jury. Again, there is a due process. It's not at the whim of a corporation. It also requires real damages such as a negative impact to someone's career, not just hurt feelings.
That's the case with all of the exceptions to free speech: there is a tangible, real world impact such as loss of income or risk of physical harm. "Feeling demeaned" is none of those things and is something that anyone can claim about anything. How you feel about something is also a choice. You can choose whether or not to let speech affect you like that.
I'll assume it's the latter, and say that's very fair. I'll also say, respectfully, it isn't terribly relevant to my observation of someone who made their point by collectivizing an entire nation of people, and did so in a pretty ham-fisted way, while availing themselves of the thing they seek to restrict.
Maybe I just find the complete absence of self-awareness in that comment to be oddly charming.
That's exactly how a lack of self awareness works.
I also hope my efforts to make it clear it was a commentary on its poetic formulation and potentially a road toward something much worse than the ill which we seek to eliminate, and not an attack on the character of someone I don't know personally (which I try to refrain from doing), were not similarly inscrutable.
That said, I thought it was a point I understand somewhat, however it was made. I just disagree with it.
But I agree with that statement. "Free speech" is often seen as absolute. But it is not absolute. Not even in the US. It never was. And it should not be. There is always a trade-off.
Limits are (copied from Wiki because I am lazy), for example: "libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury"
With that said, if you want to see laws have any effect, enforcement is required.
Calls for both an increased number of laws and enforcement of said laws (which is implicit in the assumption that these new laws will have a positive effect on a bad situation) is cause for pause, as, again, that has historically been the means by which states have worked actively against things that many observers would reasonably consider to be essential inputs to securing fundamental human rights.
It has a LOT of practical utility... But it's really important, I think, to know what that utility is and what its limits are.
And the limits exist and are quite noteworthy. Restricting someone from saying something defamatory is legally challenging relative to, say, the UK. But repeat someone's story verbatim and claim it as your own? Oops, you violated copyright, and no amount of bleating about your First Amendment rights will get you off the hook for the money you owe them, even if you didn't charge for your copy.
Who gets to pick what is harmful, though? Why can we not choose our own gatekeepers, rather than having them foisted upon us by corporate oligarchs?
The big problem here is that it is completely unreasonable and unprecedented to assume that this will be done in a transparent, consistent, open way. There will be no clear appeals process, and there's no reason to believe that the censorship won't be ideologically biased in favour of whatever is marketing best at the moment.
> it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people
It's controls on what the working class can say to large amounts of people. The elite can still just go buy a newspaper or a broadcast media network, or start their own website, etc. and issue forth opinions on a grand scale. Regular folks will have to go through censors, which will end up being some combination of AI and outsourced farms of moderators in other countries or some other such Kafkaesque nightmare of business process.
> there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.
"harmful" is a social construct, and what is "harmful" to one group might not be to another. Which groups will be prioritized for this? How will you pick sides fairly without imposing a new dimension on whatever underlying group conflicts already exist?
The problem is that what you want to do cannot be done fairly. It can only be done in a draconian way, and the result will be an even wider fracturing of dialogue in a way that doesn't result in what you want, at all.
I’m also in group b, but the danger is that if it swings too far the other way, we may have already lost the ability to speak out against _that_ and restore balance.
Yes. Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.
It won't solve our current problem, but that's what cause it. They took pg's Fluff Principal and weaponized it.
A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally.
People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally.
A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways.
While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.
This is more of a bottom-up approach which can take a few decades to show results. With that argument, I'd be inclined to look back on the last 20-60 years. What have we been teaching/instilling in our population when they were young? I look at the stuff that's happening as a symptom of a long history where we dropped the ball repeatedly.
Feels like it’s a ‘mind of humans’ issue.
Group B requires someone to take a stand on what the different types of speech are, how we recognize them, and how each should be handled, and also what the threshold of proof for untrue statements should be.
I think group A is ideal as long as the speech holds a certain level of rationality, but that limitation sort of moves it into group B since it's now subjective.
I think it boils down to: If we are unable to agree on even the simplest rules for our discourse there's no way to prevent the discourse from collapsing.
The idea that 'a platform' and 'speech' must be treated the same is ultimately a kind of class warfare -- its a false comparison that serves to benefit the rich (in this case, rich in terms of platform reach) by pretending that any attempts to place restrictions on the use of mega-platforms must necessarily imply new restrictions on the speech of the vast majority of people without such reach.
I also believe that same meaning of "free speech", that binding of the government, can't also be applied to private citizens and entities. That's a paradox; you inhibit their free speech by trying to force them to be a party to others speech.
I believe in very, very narrow exceptions to the above in the vein of what we currently have.
I also believe private citizens and entities being able to decide collectively on what is and isn't acceptable and not giving quarter to what they deem as bad actors is.. Both good and a type of free speech. It's not perfect, and we don't always agree with it, but it seems that over time we've been living in more and more liberal, socially, times while government has become EVEN MORE tied on the subject of free speech(Larry Flint? etc).
I believe it's also okay, even though I don't necessarily agree, to think we should do nothing within the public to restrict or discount others speech and opinions. But then, I'm also betting on society working that out on its own based on the above :)
Honestly, I don't think there is one. The problem with A is that it will lead to violence, anarchy, or brutal dictatorship if left completely unchecked and certain groups start to counter (verbal) arguments with death threats and violence.
There is a school of thought that says that a free society has to accept this and basically live with the fact that it's constantly in danger due to this.
But even this school of thought has one fatal flaw - its proponents lacked the information that we have now. Social media enabled psychological mechanisms that prior to its inception and widespread use were really hard to trigger.
In the 20th century, mobilising the masses was hard work and required a lot of resources (printing was expensive, organising large rallies to reach many people was expensive and dangerous, ...)
Today, everybody can - even without owning a smartphone or a computer or having internet access - reach literally billions via social media (e.g. by using an internet café). A single Facebook post or Whatsapp message can lead to riots and mobs that kill people [1].
These are means of communications and psychological effects that are simply unprecedented in human history. We opened Pandora's Box without even realising it.
When the US constitution was written, no one had social media in mind when they wrote about free speech. The very concept that a single man could within the blink of an eye spread their message to half of mankind, unchecked, without any immediate consequences, completely anonymously was just unthinkable.
The amplifying effect of digital echo chambers that suppress dissenting thought and nip constructive discourse in the bud, was yet unknown. FOMO and social media addiction didn't even enter the scientific community until just five or so years ago.
It's a really complex and difficult problem and I would love to see some constructive discussion about what to do with it (especially in the mainstream media) - preferably without reducing it to an unfruitful us-vs-them.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misin...
the still sitting president of the USA could open a channel in telegramm (no censorship at all right now), or he could use a russian service like livejournal or vkontakte (they wouldn't have a case to ban him), but I guess that's all he could do right now.
Update: he can no longer use parler, that has been removed from both app store and google play. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-fro...
it seems like banning platforms wholesale is the logical next step; so usage of alternative platforms might not be a solution.
I'd like to think most people take the quality of their content (i.e. truth and thought) as important to how they consume. All data currently points to the latter in terms of quality of content. I am concerned for the world my children and my children's children will be raised in if this trajectory keeps going.
When the people making those arguments, and the people consuming them, are not interested in "better" or even "factual", then this is an exercise in pointlessness.
People are motivated to disseminate and believe in things which fit their worldview, and they will continue to do so regardless of little things like counter-arguments or even provable facts that outright contradict their fantasies. They will continue to disseminate things they know to be false as it fits their narrative.
The marketplace of ideas is a failure in the age of social media.
We already have this in some places anyways, like courts. Why can’t we apply this more stringently for government officials?
If a company is so powerful that their moderation policies are effectively censorship, then there is definitely a serious free speech concern. The solution is to break up the monopoly so that no one company is that powerful.
If it's an open vox populi platform, and if something isn't illegal (as in quotable in law), why should a platform have its own police? Leave it to, err, police? Of course, that opens up a question of whose police and laws if the platform is global... However, my point is, if the platform is non-moderated, why censor on your own?
The other thing is that we need to recognize that the law allows for immoral, unethical and antisocial action. "Not illegal" is an incredibly low bar, and we shouldn't necessarily strive to have the legal system get involved with community morals.
They've had editorial standards. I don't know if this is much different -- it's faster for sure, but crazy people haven't always had a huge platform.
In fact, it's seems reasonable to let people say whatever they want so long as the audience is small. And I wonder isn't that pretty much how it works today?
I doubt Twitter would ban my account, if I tried to incite my 5 followers to stage a coup :D
We have laws against defamation, slander, incitement of violence; but no laws against lies. And I don’t think we should.
In any other instance, censorship should be (is?) inconstitutional.
But it's pretty complicated. Defining intolerance, eliminating bots, etc. Not an easy task.
Inciting violence and conspiracy are both crimes.
This is an attempt to intervene on a different level and I’m unsure why exactly we feel the FBI, DOJ, Secret Service, etc. aren’t up to this task.
Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook faced consequences for the genocide it helped facilitate in Myanmar.
These companies will only ever respond to a loss of revenue, which is why you are seeing these bans now instead of 5 years ago.
Twitter helped create this mess, and now people have died and our country was a few guards and a chair barricade away from an actual coup.
They're forcing Trump to join some more right-wing friendly site. Those are way more saturated with conspiracy stuff. In effect, Twitter is inadvertently exposing his audience to way more false information, achieving the exact opposite of what is ostensibly the goal here.
We do censor speech in the USA. IMO we could go a little further without being at all "Orwellian".
Many countries with very high levels of freedom from government intervention and freedom to vote and express themselves (mostly in Europe) have much stricter views on what constitutes speech that should be censored around hate speech and overly nationalistic speech.
FWIW, while many of those countries take a stricter stance on hate speech, most of them also have a much _less_ strict stance than the USA on other forms of free expression, like nudity and swear words.
It would be a humongous loss to weaken or lose freedom of speech.
As someone who lived in USSR, I am am always on the side of the freedom of speech. Of course I never supported Trump, but I think the consequences of normalizing censorship will be far more damaging then whatever he has to say.
Once you’ve lived in a totalitarian state it is obvious. I hope people who didn’t live in such states would look at the world history and learn.
Having specific restrictions for nazism can have the opposite effect: people think everything is fine because there is no nazism, but other groups, using similar dangerous schemes will not be regarded as dangerous.
Equally interesting was that these things were everywhere and none of the locals I was with had ever seen them before. Out of sight, out of mind.
It is simply one private entity using freedom of speech to say that it will no longer act as an amplifier for another private entity's speech.
Trump can (and likely will) continue to speak freely.
But the world changes and they (and too few others) are becoming de-facto platforms for speech exchange. And this needs to be properly regulated to make sure freedom of speech is not in danger
People say that free speech needs to go, but free speech has been working fine for centuries, and allowed formerly incredibly unpopular opinions to take hold, opinions that we now take for granted. There's also plenty of historical precedent for horrible shit promptly happening right after it gets removed.
The solution is not to ban wrongthinkers, or get rid of free speech. The solution is to build our civilizations communication systems in such a way that they incentivize actually productive discussion, rather than this.
Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.
It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.
In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options.
But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.
I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.
> It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.
That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.
Actually no, the "value" in Twitter for politicians is
* Short succinct messages - people don't want to read a book from their politician for every issue. If it's important and does need more, then they tweet the image of more text or whatever. But most of the time a simple headline does suffice. Otherwise twitter wouldn't be where it is.
* The tweet can be linked from anywhere else on the internet, and everyone "knows" what it should look like and can basically distinguish reality from fake stuff
* Like the above, it's uniform and simple. Someone else commented to me that each politician has access to a website or something. Did anyone else know this? I sure didn't, yet I've seen a billion links to twitter for politicians.
* It would be really sad to learn that politicans are reading replies to their tweets. I don't know how they could get anything else done. Have you ever scanned through a twitter thread from any one of trump's tweets? There is nothing of value, and it's so invaluable that I bet you everyone in the world would be better off with read-only tweets from politicians!
there's an entire industry devoted to collect and spread their words, they certainly don't need twitter to be heard.
I never said right or left though, I've said all of them, even though from an American point of view I would be described as a "communist" (it wouldn't be far from the truth TBF ...)
I am as far away from Trump as the Star Wars galaxy is from us.
Politicians already have a platform, and the platform is "being a politician"
Politicians are some of the people most engaged with politics, and I don't think such a large chilling effect fully across the subject of politics would be good for people. There are policies and changes from the status quo that I think are very important to improve society (healthcare for all, addressing climate change) and I don't think removing the most influential voices discussing and pushing these would be good for these kinds of goals, or improve sites like Twitter.
Elected officials shouldn't be in social networks not because they are all like Trump, but because they represent the people and don't need to be influencers or to have followers, they serve the people.
if they want to be heard, they can speak with their actions and their messagge will spread on social networks through the people that supports them, the press whose job is to report what they do and official press conferences that have a wide coverage on media outlets.
politicians shouldn't talk "directly to the people" because it's a lie and a distraction, we spend (waste) more time talking about what they tweet and policing what they tweet about than about what they actually do!
they are not common people and shouldn't be treated like they were.
they can have a social network account for their party and for their press office to report on their activities and that would be it.
you would be surprised to know that Angela Merkel has closed her Facebook account with more than 2.5 million folowers.
Also, social network accounts are one of the best way to leak private (or secret) informations.
back to Frau Merkel, her Instagram account (which is actually the official account of Die Bundeskanzlerin) has ben targeted by Russian hackers from day 1 and they've also stolen documens from computers in the German Parliament.
why risk it?
last but not least, social networks are private companies and don't treat users equally, they offer their propaganda platform to some but not to others.
for example Hassan Rhouani, Xi Jinping, Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-un, they are all on Facebook, but not their oppositions and people of those countries are severely limited in the access to social networks or internet in general.
so why give them a global platform? because they can pay?
I say let's ban politicians and solve it.
great powers -> great responsibilities
As far as I can tell, there are two general viewpoints:
a) Censorship is bad, free speech is good. You should counter bad arguments with better arguments.
b) There are types of speech, which are proven to lead to violence in the long-run. Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad.
I have to say, I agree with both of those points. I think group A is missing the point, that there are echo chambers and people radicalizing within their filter-bubbles up to the point of literal terrorism, while group B is missing that the power to censor can be misused by bad actors in the future and that silenced people will not just change their mind.
Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Where should I stand on this? I am leaning towards group A, while acknowledging that radicalization does happen and dearly worrying about perversion of words like "truth" or "fact" ("your/my truth", "alternate facts").