Rightly so. Freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach.
First, I did not say "freedom of speech is ...", but "you don't really have freedom of speech if ...". It's a bit like saying "you don't really have freedom of movement if you have a law abolishing the borders but at the same time another law that says that citizen will have their legs amputated". Of course, "freedom of movement" isn't "freedom of having your legs", but the point is that the GOAL of freedom of movement can be, in practice, impaired if you apply some rules that impair it.
The problem here is that "move along somewhere else" is impacted by this law: apparently (not 100% but some sentence in the text seems to say that), this law can say that every "somewhere else" can be forced to accept the mass of "shut up" people. So, there will be nowhere to go where they can speak freely, which, in practice, will force them to just not being able to exercise their freedom of speech right.
I really don't get people who are pro freedom of speech, but at the same time have no much problem will people being coerced, in one way or another, to not speak. Either they are hypocritical (and want to be able to impose their speech without caring about the speech of others), or they've released the substance for the shadows (they are putting values on an empty concept instead of focusing on the goal).
Across an entire population it has a democratic effect when freedom of speech is in full effect without being restricted or controlled by government for means of shaping the outcome.
If I say "Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm" I will fully expect to be boo'd at, shouted down, blocked, shunned and made unwelcome. That tells me my views are not welcome. I can choose to stay, and keep using my voice, but it'll be counter productive.
So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.
Or, people just keep telling me I am an idiot and that's OK too.
I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.
100% agree. But it works both ways, and you cannot say that "cancel culture" is a problem: they are just doing that.
> So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.
Uh? That does not make any sense. If they get enough votes to be elected, it means that the majority of the population will not boo them in the first place. And if you argue that by organizing in a small safe place they've found strategies to convince more and more people, you are just saying that it was wrong (for a freedom of speech point of view, I'm personally in support of some moderation) to boo them in the first place: if their opinions are convincing people, when you were booing them, you were doing exactly what the concept of freedom of speech try to avoid: you were working against the freedom of idea and the possibility for new ideas to find their public.
> I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.
And inversely, right? right?
I think this is the point: "How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?" Exactly like that.
What you are describing is called a "hugbox", aka: safe-space. Any platform that actually catered to every neurosis would be totally silent.
> ...cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".
I wonder how much thought you've actually put into that opinion. Because, for example, Twitter was very aggressively "moderated" and is also the birthplace of what most would characterize as "cancel culture". With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.
Well, it's a false dilemma: you don't need to have either a law that force all moderation to be identical everywhere or having places that are absolute safe-space. As long as you have some place that guarantee some opinions safe space, where is the problem?
The hypocrisy is that the neurosis of someone is the freedom of speech of another. Bigotry, racism, sexism, ... are arguably as legitimately a neurosis as "woke culture". Yet, anti-cancel-culture people are often promoting solutions where, in practice, we force everywhere to be a safe-space for those anti-woke "neurosis".
> With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.
You are failing at logic.
"what happens if you don't have a place well moderated" does not imply "if a place moderated exists, it cannot happen".
Twitter was not "well" moderated, because it allowed cancel culture. It was heavily moderated, which does not mean it was well moderated.
In fact, I even think that "well moderated" is rather impossible (you notice the quote-marks around the word moderation in the quote you've used, right?). The best we can have is "diversity of moderation", with several instance that have different moderation rules. Absolute freedom of speech is a concept that just takes water quickly when you think about it with intellectual honesty.
I think the idea is that you don't really have free speech is some group of people are afraid to speak, which is what you have when it's not well moderated.
It's, I think, the argument in the center of "cancel culture is bad for free speech". Cancel culture don't stop people before they talk, and don't legally condemn anyone, but they force some people to not say what they have on their mind because the consequences will be unpleasant for them. In fact, I would even say that people who are critical against cancel culture but are also arguing that free speech should not be moderated are just hypocritical: cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".