What a surprise that this crew seems very much in this boat.
I'm not issuing judgement on if paypal is in the right here or not (although my knee jerk reaction is that they are not), but the age-old "they're pedophiles" canard is well past dog-whistling and into trainwhistling at this point.
I try to follow this myself, but I do find myself giving exceptions to specific touchy subjects. For example, I don't understand how to approach a touchy subject where open discussion actually drives away people and therefore makes it an echo chamber.
For example if a gay person left a community because people were openly discussing whether or not gay people are pedophiles and advocating for the castration and torture of gay people, and that the advocating for castration and torture of gay people wasn't being shut down, I honestly think that's a totally reasonable behavior on behalf of the gay person. And I honestly would disagree that this created anything even remotely resembling a "forward path" direction.
But, in abstract, I still believe we should openly discuss touchy subject matters. I just find myself constantly running into actual application where I disagree that openly discussing a specific matter actually benefitted anyone, and found myself agreeing that the community would be healthier if specific topics of conversation were shut down.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/arguments-as-soldiers a topic which I'm thinking about now because a few days ago I noticed half an hour too late that "you need to wear a mask while on public transport in Berlin" has shifted to the side effects of vaccines without me realising.
There are lines you don’t cross with kids. When people try to erase those lines it has to be called out.
I'm glad you agree that transphobia should be addressed!
> People aren't just making this connection for no reason.
Indeed, this rhetoric is being used for fear-mongering and scape-goating in order to distract from certain problems and/or manipulate people into voting for fascists.
Try writing your own article and submit it to their site. They won't publish it unless it's some right wing conspiracy bullshit. That's their right, of course: it's their platform and they get to choose what gets published, and anything they don't agree with gets "cancelled" for anyone who wants to use that moronic term.
But then they try to turn around and get their own crap published on other, more credible platforms, because otherwise nobody will read it. And of course, these platforms, such as universities and newspapers have a reputation to protect, so they aren't going to publish a bunch of nonsense.
On one side of the spectrum we have your private home. Obviously your having the ability to infringe on my freedom to speak in that very specific and limited venue doesn't seem to lead to any great societal ills.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a government owned public square. I think it's clear enough that any regulation of speech there including informal coercion not to speak is quite likely to lead to significant political and social problems. Limitations on government power mitigate a lot of this but certainly not all of it.
And then we have large corporate owned properties, both online and in the physical world, where the public is more or less permitted to gather but the regular protections don't apply. Presumably the problems caused by regulating speech are related to scale. So at what point should regulation apply?
The concept of a common carrier isn't new. Twitter hosts prominent politicians from multiple large countries. It seems obvious to me that they crossed that line some point even if I don't know precisely where it lies.
Basically this.
Students Unions have the absolute right to refuse to platform people (and to oppose their platforming by the institution in which they operate), if those people being given a platform runs contrary to the wishes of the student body the Union represents.
Nobody has a right to anyone else's platform. Making people platform your views is coerced speech.
"Racist" is the equivalent of the n-word but it is directed at whites.
any open forum for discussion would end with your arguments defeated so you need censorship to thrive.