I dislike the people that support facist, racist beliefs, but I 100% will defend their right to say such things. In my opinion, once you start talking about restricting speech, you get into the grey area - who decides what speech to restrict? Off the top of my head, the most "capable" organizations would be either:
- The companies who run these glorified advertising platforms (which would regulate speech based on "how much money will we lose?"), or
- a Governmental body (which by its nature has a monopoly on violence - "if you say something we don't like, your social credit score goes down and you can't leave the country or we throw you in jail"). I think freedom of speech is a very large part of what makes America distinctive from other countries.
- Alternatively, we could have whoever the loudest complainers are control speech, which would be very reactionary - driven by misinformation or coordinated culture change campaigns(?)
If the people with abhorrent opinions decide to start causing direct physical harm to people in reality - that's when police, government, etc. should step in and penalize them - not social media companies or governments, or the vocal minority determining what people should and shouldn't say.
Here's I think the real issue, we make discussion platforms... people don't want to discuss. They just want to put up and push posters of what they believe.
And we're surprised when things go wrong.
The other day, we talked with family members and all I heard was slogans (the 'energy independent','damn socialists' type ). And it is hard to talk about it, because you have to start by dispelling the slogans and that alone is an hour of deprogramming ( assuming you have receptive audience ). I gave up on that challenge.
And I feel like I failed there, because we DO need to discuss things. We will most assuredly not agree, but need to stop taking our news from one source. Diverse diet is probably the only way to go.
Even if allowing fascists and racists to express their speech actively harms or silences you in turn?
Relevant: https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1031008855210123264/p...
Lat's say they're successful and they can impose their own policies that do not include free speech.
I'm pretty short on free speech now...
It's hard to ignore that.
I wonder how that can be avoided.