I was mostly joking to prove a point, but I appreciate you saying that. I was just trying to cool the debate a bit, not stir the pot. I’ll admit I may have inflamed tensions myself, and for that I apologize. You seem to be arguing in good faith, even if I disagree with your position. You seem like a decent person.

I guess I’m more of a discordian, or a culture jammer type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you’re talking about as cognito hazards that spontaneously occur when you have a large enough target demographic for them to appeal to. I suppose I just find your cure worse than the disease. I’d rather take the bathwater and the baby than just the baby. Call me crazy, but I think that variety is the spice of life. Some conspiracies are true, and are only theories until proved. I look at them as pathogens that are endemic, yet without them, we would have no EICAR test files for validating legitimate points of view and nothing with which to compare the status quo. Outsider voices have free speech rights too, even if they use them for ends antithetical to our own; that we oppose them doesn’t justify annihilating them, or their views.

If discourse got us into this mess, I can’t see how less of it is going to get us out of it. We need more spaces for productive discussions, and we need more outreach to the fringes. How else will we convince anyone? If all you want is compliance, then the law is a poor tool for that. It only incentivizes circumvention once ratified.

I appreciate you saying that. And I'm a big ol' Robert Anton Wilson fan, a life-long ACLU contributor, and someone who views free speech as the only way to disinfect hate, racism and lies. And I am very much talking in good faith; this is what I believe. I just think that free speech doesn't have to be equally easy. I remember when news channels in the US had to give equal time to opposite political parties. I watched how that morphed into "fair and balanced" - giving 3 panelists a chance to beat up on the weakest member of the opposite group. I don't think Facebook or Twitter are in any sense Discordian or Erisian in the tidy bubbles they ferment. I agree it's foolish to go about trying to silence people on them. I'd say just shut the whole thing down. If you want real Eris, let a million websites bloom. The information ecosystem was much better when people had to go out hunting than when it was fed to them in a news stream on an app that was designed for nothing more than monetizing their attention span. And a lot fewer people were exposed to truly bad ideas.

I do have a breaking point, as far as ideas and speech; I believe that some ideas are stalking horses for violence, and the people who spout them have no goodwill. Some ideas can't be reasoned with. I'm glad I live in a country that still allows people to speak those ideas, but very few people will defend that notion anymore. I'll defend their right to speak those ideas. I just don't think a private company should be immune from the result of providing them a platform.

The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard. Somewhere along the line, people seem to have misconstrued that, because social media made it so easy to be heard that people assumed that was the definition of free speech.

> The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard.

There’s no right to be heard, true. Yet, these are users complying with TOS. Beyond that, do the users have any obligation to not spread content that they haven’t validated? It seems an unreasonable burden to place on users who don’t post content for consumption by folks who care about such things. Can you blame people for speaking their mind and playing to their audience? Maintaining the platform and only posting constructive, mainstream content only appeals to a certain kind of person, and they may never reach their intended audience with such messaging, warping and contorting their content into something else entirely, potentially alienating the very people they are trying to reach in the first place.

I’m a descriptivist in the linguistic sense, and when it comes to free speech. More is better. Full stop.

I remember when everything was hard online. I don’t wish for those days to return, especially just to comply with misguided, ineffective government mandates at the behest of megacorps and special interest lobby groups.