Imagine Tim had built the Web the same way folks built Twitter. All our web pages would be would be hosted by a single company, accessed through an API that they defined and could change at whim. Web applications would be far weaker than they are today (since it would be hard to store anything interesting on TimCo’s servers) and powerful corporations would constantly be knocking people offline permanently for various terms-of-service violations (no trademark infringement! no hate speech!).

It is an argument about who set the bound of acceptable speech if you are more precise.

Freedom of speech is something that is good in and of itself. A situation in which the government ruled out some ideas from being discussed or developed is one I would find very unpleasant.

and yet we have libel laws, anti hate speech provisions, corporate secrecy laws and so on and so forth all of which prohibit me from saying things just because I feel like it.

But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.

Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.

Not sure what you meant by this paragraph.

> But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.

I think both discussions are extremely important at this point in time. Personally, I don't think companies should be obligated to provide a platform for people with all kinds of ideas, but I think that they should nonetheless do so (because I think freedom of speech is a good thing). I am in favour of freedom of speech on social media, but not in favour of this being mandated by law (because it isn't contradictory to freedom of speech to have some spaces in which freedom of speech is not allowed).

>Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.

I'm not sure what Voltaire was talking about, because I have not read Voltaire. But if one believes that freedom of speech is valuable in and of itself, or that it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths, then one ought to be in favour of freedom of speech on Reddit.

I find it very hard to believe you're not familiar with the famous Voltaire quote about free speech.

> it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths

You might say this, but it doesn't make it universally true.

You may not be aware of this, but in the US, "hate speech" is protected expression under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Setting aside the question of whether this has actually happened like you say it has, the much broader critique I'd offer is that nobody who was defending free speech from the left in the 1970s [0] would be surprised that hate groups are allowed to operate under the cover of those protections. It used to be taken as a given on the left that free speech is so important that it is worth defending the right to the worst kinds of speech.

I see this a lot, recently -- this sentiment that yeah free speech is important, but you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this -- and that's wrong. Your liberal predecessors did know that it would be used like this and they explicitly and clear-headedly defended it, anyway.

[0] The ACLU defended literal Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

This is a fairly contrarian line to take. How would you say that it hasn't?

> you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this

To me this seems a little bit of a naive take. Nobody is arguing that free speech should be curtailed - at least not in any legal sense. But as a principle it does compete against various other ones, such as decency and respect, not to mention security and business concerns.

It's the people arguing that free-speech as a right is absolute and overrides all else, and whatsmore outside of a purely legal setting (i.e. not just that the state can't prosecute you, but that it gives you the right to insult, and belittle people) that are missing the point.

Voltaire offered to defend the right of his opponents to express their thoughts, but did not volunteer to give them a platform, or even to listen.

> The ACLU defended literal Nazis

I don't see a conflict here. The state should be blind, after all it's important for democracy that Nazis and other dodgy straw men should see their side of the story aired, and thus buy in overall. It doesn't mean that society as a whole can't make judgements on the value of Nazism.

When the KKK marched in Washington in 1925, there were 30k participants and more than 100k others showed up to watch.

What I'm arguing is that we are not in fact experiencing unprecedented times that call for new restrictions. The left lived through that and maintained their commitment to defending free speech.

I'm sorry, I think we might be talking cross purposes here ...

I was talking about Aaron Swartz specific advocacy around digital free speech, which reddit embodied spiritually up until rather recently. Some of the community activity went very far down the rabbit hole indeed. I was speculating if Aaron Swartz might have experienced some kind of dissonance at that, though public discourse being what it is he might not have been able to express that ... but alas he did not live to see his views challenged thus.

Of course there are historical parallels to this, across history and many other aspects of society. I don't see how the need to continue this discussion is any less relevant today than it was then though.

One is that everything is national or global now, so if there is one Nazi anywhere, everybody hears about it and misleads people into thinking there are more of them than there are. This also feeds into trolls pretending to be Nazis because they see what a rise it gets out of people, thereby causing people to overestimate their number even more.

The second is that there is always a boogeyman. In the early 20th century it was anarchists. Then communists had a good long run. It became terrorists after 9/11. Now it's racists.

You can tell when this is happening because the proposals are to censor/incarcerate/kill some vile subhuman Enemy who cannot be reasoned with, with isolated instances being exaggerated excessively. Whereas if there were actual Nazis as a meaningful political force you would see e.g. serious attempts to re-institute segregation or have to fight hard to prevent Nazis from censoring you.

What I mean is that everyday "free speech" in the legal sense is already curtailed (and accepted to be so) by various other concerns.

I would say the other reason my views on freee speech have evolved because I now see “hate” as a virus of the mind and it is easily spread through the internet in the most deceitful and cunning ways, leading to destruction and violence toward the person or people it is directed at.

When it is right wing suppressing speech or freedom, all is cool. When someone protests them, suddenly the protest itself is threat to free speech. The insuation is that free speech is less likely to be invoked to protect left or extreme left speech.

I think it's the opposite and you reinforce their behaviors and thinking.

Paradox of tolerance.

I find it more likely that most of what you're labeling as hate is just a difference in opinion.

Just because you're not seeing these people on your daily social media doesn't mean they're not gathering elsewhere. It's mostly likely a place that doesn't have any alternative views as well.

How do you explain large hate groups that existed long before the internet was invented? White supremacy is barely even a threat now, it's such a small minority of people compared to what it was in the past.