Remember those cases were Facebook was promoted to use violence and persecutions against religious minorities across the globe? And then after the investigations, Facebook just brushed it off as "oh, that, sorry we didn't know"?
Reddit was full on anti china rage exactly a year ago, so much so, that the moderators of the covid subgroups themselves started moderating it in a way that allowed for some objectivity one of the covid groups.
I guess the difference here is that Facebook, Twitter and Reddit who have been prospering with this poison are now at a point where they can no longer play the ignorance card, which is why they banned a certain individual.
The main contrast is that Parler's rhetoric is that they'll take all the discards from the other platforms.
If someone promotes a campaign to hunt down an individual and murder him/her; certainly I wouldn't blame anyone for taking that content down. I think we already have a good tool for where the line goes and that is the law. E.g. you can't recruit and plan for terrorism and you can't spread child pornography among other horrible things.
This is something else. This is a situation where three major companies use vague paragraphs in their terms and conditions to target a specific platform.
What's next? If Parler self-hosts, will demands come to ISPs to shut them down? Where does it end.
They existed, it's just that it takes a lot of courage to speak out against deplatforming ISIS, so most people just stay silent in public. I was fairly outspoken about defending their right to expression, but that was only to "safe" groups of friends rather than the general public. (Of course, now that ISIS is basically dead I can be a bit more free with my words and admit to disliking them being censored)
Regarding your kids agitating example, as a society we already do plenty of brainwashing of kids, it's why our ideas of right and wrong are so different from 200 years back.
Also, we had near absolute free speech on most of the internet for most of the 2000s, so your fearmongering there rings hollow.
Your reply is not addressing the main point: that P believes there ought to be limits to free speech (imo also a completely obvious conclusion). P provides simple "Ad absurdum" examples for why that is. In you stating that kids are "brainwashed" elsewhere too is just engaging in whataboutism.
Can you explain why you think there is sufficient additional value in completely---absurdly so---free speech (as per P's scenarios, for example) over limiting obviously dangerous and detrimental speech? Obviously the crux lies in drawing the required boundary, which is the job of an educated society as a whole and might be in flux with the times.
Not simply, no.
It's a very long (book sized) argument that I've been gradually making bits and pieces of over the years. I really wish I'd kept the little bits I'd type out in one forum or another so I could just point at that...
Though, for a fragment and possible intuition pump: the censoring is putting the cart before the horse. You need to determine whether something is dangerous or detrimental before banning it, but the act of censoring it or neighbouring ideas or the kind of people who espouse it prevents that very determination that ensures you aren't censoring true things. You also get all sorts of other effects like purity spirals and fights over which group gets to decide what is censored and groups then doing things even they admit is wrong in order to keep control of the censors ("it's worth a little lie to stop the nazis taking control").
EDIT: You're correct that the comment about kids isn't a full argument, it's an argument fragment that needs various other things to be held and explained in order to be complete. But there's no point in spending ages outlining it all unless I'm going to do so in a less transient medium like a blog post. So instead I post the fragment hoping it's the one piece the reader was missing for things to click.
Would you please provide a link to ex-president Trump inciting violence like ISIS? Lesser forms of agitation for violence is fine too.
To illustrate: absolutely free speech would imply the right to harmfully agitate kids for whatever your cause is. Does it seem obvious that this is a bad idea? Then just extrapolate "kids are easy to manipulate" to "adults are mostly just older kids".
And btw, I know what it's like to be on the other side. That doesn't justify turning a blind eye to the madness that comes with absolute free speech.
Either you accept that a line has to be drawn somewhere, or you accept every consequence of absolute free speech. Which, imo, would be a terrible idea with 7 billion people just waiting to be gamed through their fears.
Don't get me wrong, I don't consider what we're seeing here unproblematic at all. I just don't consider absolute free speech to be unproblematic either, quite the opposite.